Icarus: The Image of the Artist in French Romanticism [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674424043, 9780674424012

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HARVARD STUDIES IN ROMANCE LANGUAGES Published under the Direction of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures VOLUME XXVII

Maurice

2.

Shroder

Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts l 96i

© Copyright 1961 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved

Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, London

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number

61-15218

Printed in the United States of America

For my mother and my father.

Preface "ROMANTICISM," in this book as in its subtitle, refers rather to a complex of ideas and attitudes than to a period of literary history the limits of which, in France, are rigidly marked by the success of the Méditations and the failure of Les Burgraves. I am interested more in the history of ideas than in the study of a twenty-five year period of French literature. The ideas and the period are related, of course: the period from i8zo to 1843, or at most to 1848, was that during which the ideas and attitudes I consider Romantic were most prominent, and in their purest form. But the Goncourts' reflection, when Flaubert was called to account for the "immoralities" in Madame Bovary, that Romanticism had become a crime against the state, indicates that the authors of the nineteenth century worried less about "periods" and cared more about ideas than we seem to do. They did not, on the other hand, have to fight such terms as "Symbolists" and "Realists," since they knew that both groups were actually composed of minor authors who flourished for very short periods, the Symbolists around 1890, the Realists during the eighteen-fifties. And Victor Hugo denied the absolute critical distinction between Romanticism and Realism in asking why the former had to reject the latter. "Does the oak," he asked, "reject the mistletoe?" The central literary and ideological opposition of the nineteenth century may be resolved by the simple rules of action and reaction: no Ro-

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Preface manticism, no Realism. If there are no imaginary gardens, the real toads may well have no place to go. The five essays that compose the core of this study, then, treat five French Romantics — Hugo, Balzac, Vigny, Flaubert, and Baudelaire — in the light of a single idea, the Romantic image of the artist. The inclusion of Hugo and Vigny needs no justification; that of Balzac is not difficult to provide. Although his works belong to the tradition of nineteenthcentury Realism, they are colored by the concerns and attitudes of Romanticism; and Balzac himself, as Baudelaire suggested, is the most Romantic of heroes. Flaubert and Baudelaire find their place with the others as members of the second generation of Romanticism. Catulle Mendes spoke of that generation as "neo-Romantics"; and they did begin to write before the theatrical catastrophe that marks the end of the Romantic period for the literary chronologists. More important, they had — as Zola said of his own generation — "soaked in Romantic gravy." Their ideas and their attitudes derived from those of their predecessors. The one author whose exclusion may need some justification, Stendhal, did not quite share the same notions: he belonged to an earlier generation than that of Hugo, Balzac, and Vigny, and his works are colored by many different concerns. Since Romanticism was a shared set of ideas, I have both referred to and quoted from many lesser nineteenth-century authors. They help to provide a matrix for the study of my five major writers; and, as so often in the study of ideological currents, the minor authors sometimes express the thoughts of their time in a more concise, if more limited, way than do their genial contemporaries. Most of these minor authors — and some more important ones — appear in my introductory and concluding chapters, which, since they cover long periods and many men, are necessarily somewhat schematic. Having mentioned quotations, I must say that I have

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Preface adopted the current convention of American publishing: verse passages appear in the original, while prose texts, with a few exceptions (usually such untranslatable words and phrases as cénacle, honnête homme, mal du siècle, and so on), appear in English. The translations are all mine, and I take full responsibility for them. I might say a word, too, about the notes. There are two series: critical notes, which appear at the bottom of the page; and reference notes, grouped by paragraph and indicated by superior numbers, which appear at the back of the book. I should like to thank the Samuel S. Fels Fund for the grant that made possible much of my research. Special thanks go to Professors Harry Levin, Renato Poggioli, and W. M. Frohock, whose guidance and suggestions proved invaluable in the writing of this book; and to Professor Paul De Man, Professor Paul Bénichou, M. Claude Vigée, Mr. Martin Wine, Mr. Thomas Woodard, and Mr. D. Hayes McKeen, all of whom helped immeasurably in the revising and preparation of the manuscript. I am grateful to the Harvard College Libraries for their courtesy in supplying photographs for several of the illustrations. Lastly, I must thank my typist, Miss Eleanor Venuti, for a splendid job, and Professor Daniel Delakas for all those years of encouragement. Harvard University January 2, 1961

M. Z. S.

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Contents I 11

The Romantic Image of the Artist The Orphic Mission of Victor Hugo

i 60

III

Honoré de Balzac: The Poet as Demiurge

IV

Alfred de Vigny: The Man in the Ivory Tower 12 3

V VI

VII

93

Gustave Flaubert: The Artist as Raging Saint 151 Charles Baudelaire and the Mirror of Narcissus 181 The Fate of Icarus

217

Notes on the Illustrations Notes

253

Index

279

2 51

Illustrations Facing page

Portrait of Madame de Staël as Corinne by Élisabeth VigéeLebrun. Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva.

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Frontispiece to Diderot's Neveu de Rameau (1821).

33

Eugène Delacroix, "Le Tasse dans la maison des fous." Photographie Durand-Ruel.

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Tony Johannot, vignette from VArtiste.

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Honoré Daumier, "Hugo, lorgnant les voûtes bleues . . ." Le Charivari, March 31, 1843.

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Honoré Daumier, "Le bois est cher et les arts ne vont pas," Le Charivari, May 6, 1833.

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Honoré Daumier, "Les Crétins! . . ." Le Charivari, June 1, 1865.

128

Gustave Moreau, "Les Plaintes du poète." Photographie Giraudon.

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ICARUS The Image of the Artist in French Romanticism

Chapter I

The Romantic Image of the Artist

T h e belief that the artist is an ideal type, a full realization of the human potential, lay at the heart of the Romantic ethic. French poets and painters in the nineteenth century explained their devotion to art and tried to excuse their errors and their excesses by proclaiming that the practice of art was the most elevated human activity, that the artist was necessarily the finest and the most worthy of men. Through the curious influence that literature often exercises on life, the Romantic image of the artist became a model for character and behavior: the condition and the very designation of artiste were coveted, one author of the period tells us, as the conditions and designations of the titled nobility had once been desired.1 It was not really a phenomenon peculiar either to the nineteenth century or to France. The writers of the Renaissance had considered the poet "the most divine of men." Plato's dialogues on divine madness provided confirmation for their sense of superiority and served as a rationale for their selfcelebration. The Pléiade poet Pontus de Tyard even reordered the varieties of possession so that the fureur poétique, the inI

ICARUS spiration of the Muses, was the prerequisite for the other three, the madness of the prophet, the initiate, and the lover. But the Romantic image of the artist was broader than the Renaissance image of the poet; and the pretensions to power, the claims for rewards and recognition made by the Romantics, were correspondingly greater. And, while Romanticism was not, to be sure, simply a phenomenon of French literature — while the German poets and theorists of the late eighteenth century elaborated the image of the genius, while everyone in England from Keats to Carlyle proclaimed the poet's superiority — it was in France that "artistomania," as Charles de Bernard called it, found its most extensive development.2

The key to the French Romantics' image of the artist lies in the word artiste itself, and semantics must be the first tool in our examination. Such ancient equivalents as technetor and artifex designated craftsmen rather than artists in the modern sense of the word; and the German Kunstler does not seem to possess all the connotations, the full emotional charge, with which the French Romantics invested artiste. The history of the word is both long and complex, since its meaning has always been dictated by those of art: as art designated particular disciplines, as its meaning was extended or limited, the denotative value of artiste changed.3 The clearest illustrations of the early meanings of artiste are to be found not in French texts, but in Dante and in Shakespeare. As he rises through the progressively brightening circles of Paradise, Dante learns from Thomas Aquinas that nature is a faulty imitator of the creative power emanated from God. Were nature's hand steady, says the sainted spirit, the matter of created things would reveal the stamp of the divine Idea; but — 2

Romantic Image of the Artist la natura la da sempre scema, similemente operando all'artista, ch' ha l'abito dell'arte e man che trema.* {Paradiso, XIII 76-78) Shakespeare's Agamemnon, reflecting on another divine power, that of Fortune, tells his fellow generals that those who pursue the favors of that goddess lose all distinction: . . . the bold and coward, The wise and fool, the artist and unread, The hard and soft, seem all affined and kin. (Troilus and Cressida, I iii 23-25) The meanings of artista and artist in these two passages clearly differ from each other; and neither is clearly identical with the most general modern meaning of the word, a practitioner of the fine arts. But if we remember that the terms "fine arts" and its French equivalent beaux-arts did not enter common usage until the seventeenth century, we may more easily resolve the dilemma.4 Shakespeare's contemporary, Randle Cotgrave, defined artiste in his Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues ( 1 6 1 1 ) as "an artist, or Master of art." It is in this sense, obviously, that Shakespeare used the word in Troilus and Cressida. The opposition of "the artist and unread" is that of the university-educated scholar and the illiterate. It was with this sense also that the word had first appeared in French: that medieval blue-stocking, Christine de Pisan, had adapted the French artiste from the late Latin artista, which the du Cange Glossarium defines as liberalium artium peritus, "skilled in the liberal arts." The liberal arts — the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and the quadrivium of arithmetic, geom* The Rev. Philip H . Wicksteed translated these lines as: ". . . but nature ever furnisheth it faulty, doing as doth the artist who hath the knack of his art and a trembling hand." (The Paradiso of Dante Alighteri, London, 1954, p. 161).

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ICARUS etry, astronomy, and music — were "the arts" of the Middle Ages. Music, the only one of the fine arts that appears in the list, was traditionally felt to be more analogous to the various disciplines of mathematics than to poetry and painting. And, while painting, sculpture, and architecture became "liberal arts" during the sixteenth century, poetry had not yet joined them to form the body of the arts as we think of them today. It is, however, with poetry that the word art was linked from antiquity: the phrase ars poetica forces us to consider the etymological significance of art, a method, or body of techniques, which in turn clarifies the meaning which Dante gave to artista. Nature, according to the Paradiso, is not a fine artist, but a weak-handed craftsman. "Artisan" is the word one might be tempted to use; and Cotgrave's additional reference of artiste to his definition of artisan — "an artificer, workman, handicrafts man" — indicates that the two words were not clearly distinguished in French. Montaigne spoke of the "painter, poet, or other artisan"; or, if one prefers the testimony of a poet, one may turn to Ronsard's preface to the Franciade-. "Some think that the poet and the historian practice the same trade; but they are greatly mistaken, for these are different artisans who have nothing in common except the description of things." T h e confusion of artiste and artisan, of arts and métiers — a phrase still current in French, as is the corresponding "arts and crafts" in English — persisted well into the eighteenth century.* Rousseau's P y g malion, afraid that he has lost his genius, cries out, "Pygmalion, * So did another rather special meaning of artiste-, chemist, or alchemist, which at the time still meant pretty much the same thing. Alchemy was l'art sacré or the grand art, meanings still admitted late in the nineteenth century by Littré. T h e sixth edition of the dictionary of the Académie Française, published in 1835, excluded the meaning "alchemist." Since Littré retained the corresponding definition of art, however, it is likely that Baudelaire and Mallarmé, when they spoke of the art of poetry as an alchemical process, were aware of this use of the word.

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R o m a n t i c Image of the A r t i s t you no longer create gods; y o u are only a vulgar artist." H e clearly means that he possesses only the technical aspects of sculpture, and his heartfelt c r y sums up the long-standing semantic confusion of the creative artist with the craftsman w h o knows his trade. 5 But the mid-eighteenth century witnessed the clarification of the distinction between artiste and artisan. T h e Encyclopédie, more interested in the mechanical arts and crafts than in the fine arts, provides little help. O n the other hand, D u Bos apologized to poets and painters for referring to them as artisans; the Dictionnaire portatif des beaux-arts applied the word artiste to the practitioners of the liberal arts, especially painters, sculptors, and engravers; and Voltaire, in the Dictionnaire philosophique and the Siècle de Louis XIV, extended artiste to include writers and poets. B y the end of the century, and especially in the decrees published b y the Revolutionary governments, artiste achieved not merely popularity, but a use so wide and so loose that several commentators were moved to protest. Féraud objected to doctors and surgeons so designating themselves. Mercier dismissed artiste as a euphemism for actor; and in 1801 he exclaimed violently, in his Néologie-. Artist-dancer, Artist-actor, Artist-ventriloquist, Artist-violinist; and people were on the verge of saying the Artist Montesquieu, the Artist Buffon as well; but the reign of the word Artist has come to an end, since the trial brought by the Artists-poulterers of La Flèche against the Artists-poulterers of Le Mans. Mercier was wrong, however. T h e Dictionnaire du baslangage (1808) found it shameful that the word was used to designate "actors, the meanest mountebanks, the most obscure artisans, even bootblacks." But long before this time, Diderot had used artiste regularly and consistently. In his Salons the word denotes — as it did in the Dictionnaire portatif des

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ICARUS beaux-arts — painters, sculptors, and engravers. Artiste for Diderot meant one who knows and can use the techniques of the graphic arts, and more precisely, one who creates a work of art: simply to appreciate beauty, to feel things deeply, did not necessarily make one an artist. Diderot also differed from Voltaire in that he did not consider a writer an artist: he contrasted the artiste, painter, sculptor, or engraver, and the litterateur, the man of letters.6 In spite of these various protests and limitations, the use of artiste in its modern sense was consecrated in 1796 by Collin d'Harleville. The title characters of his comedy Les Artistes were a painter, a poet, and a musician; his treatment of them was one of the earliest sympathetic portrayals of artists in French literature. There seem to be no records of the treatment accorded artiste during the troubled years of the early nineteenth century, but in the eighteen-twenties, the word emerged largely purified of its earlier meanings, restricted to the practitioners of the fine arts. The young Scribe, in 1821, presented a comedy entitled VArtiste, in which he used the word in an absolute sense. His protagonist proudly referred to himself as an artiste — he was both painter and musician —, wore a "costume d'artiste," and so on. It seems probable that the Saint-Simonians had no little hand in popularizing the word among the Romantics. SaintSimon divided mankind into three groups: artistes, savants, and industriéis — practitioners of the fine arts, scientists, and merchants or manufacturers. Definitions of artiste appeared in various Saint-Simonian texts. In 1825 Olinde Rodrigues and Léon Halévy inserted a note in their dialogue, "L'Artiste, le savant et rindustriel," which read: By artist we mean the poet in the broadest sense of this word: the word artist, in this dialogue . . . thus means the man of imagination, and it embraces at once the works of the painter,

6

Romantic Image of the Artist the musician, the poet, the man of letters, and so on, in a word, everything which has sensation as its object.7 In 1830 £mile Barrault clarified this meaning: This word Artist should not be taken simply to mean the painter, the musician, the sculptor, and so forth, for whom it seems to be reserved, but also the poet and the orator, according to the broader acceptance which SAINT-SIMON has rightly restored to it, since poetry and eloquence are no less arts than are painting and music.8 It should be apparent from these examples that the ideal type of the nineteenth century was not merely the poet in the limited sense, the writer — who was, after all, the last to be considered an artist. The Romantics were convinced that all the arts are Art, that any practitioner of the arts may lay claim to the designation artiste — a designation which became a semiofficial rallying point in 1831, when a periodical, written largely by poets and about painters, was founded and named L'Artiste. It was at this same time that artiste acquired an emotional value as well as a denotative one. "Artist is a beautiful word!" wrote Jules Janin. "It's as if you were saying 'intelligent' . . . So, if you point out a man, in a palace or in a garret, and you use the word artist, I salute that man, I envy him in either place; he is a fortunate man in this world, he is a dreamer, he is a carefree philosopher, little concerned with the material facts of life, and who does not realize their extent or their danger." As Janin's effusions suggest, many Romantics of 1830 in no way limited the word artiste to its etymological sense of "technician," or one versed in a craft. Art itself meant more than the technique of poetry or of painting: it was a way of life, a quasi-religious concept. "One is born a poet," Janin proclaimed, recalling the Poetae nascuntur of Horace and demolishing that contrast between the gifts of nature and the rewards of study current in the

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ICARUS Renaissance. Even the technical distinction between artiste and artisan was rephrased in moral terms, as this definition by George Sand attests: "The artisan polishes off his task to augment his profits; the artist grows pale during ten years, in an attic, over a work which would have made his fortune, but which he will not release as long as it is not finished according to his conscience." The Complément du dictionnaire de F Académie published in 1842 admitted an etymologically indefensible use of artiste-, "used today, in a figurative sense, of one who, without being an artist in the literal sense of the word, has a feeling for the arts" — in other words, the "art-lover," the man who drifted through the studios and the cénacles, who appreciated art and produced nothing. Balzac could scoff with reason at "the word artiste, which satisfies fools"; but, from the vantage point of 1865, Gautier would say that in the eighteen-thirties, "the word artiste excused everything." 9 The new difficulty was the differentiation between artiste and poète, a differentiation which the Saint-Simonians had all but eradicated and which Jules Janin effectively ignored. Diderot had already distinguished between them. Poète in his Salons designated the man of imagination, the man of sensibility. A poète, as I have said, was not necessarily an artiste. Madame de Staël had approached a distinction in De F Allemagne when she wrote of Klopstock that "he expressed great thoughts and noble feelings in beautiful verses; but he was not what you would call an artist"; he lacked, she said, "a creative imagination." The province of the poet was dream; that of the artist was creation, execution of a particular work of art. Victor Hugo, who generally attributed a greater value to the gifts of the poet, wrote in sending advice on meters and rhymes to Victor Pavie, "I offer several bits of advice to the artist, but I submit them to the consideration of the 8

Romantic Image of the Artist The word poète was a Romantic term of approval and a password to acceptance in the cénacles and the studios, to be sure; but it carried a broader meaning than "he who writes verse." The poet, in the absolute sense in which the Romantics of 1830 understood the word, was the man of imagination, the creative genius — versifier, novelist, painter, sculptor, musician. In fact, the emphasis laid on imagination and on creative activity was so great that the poet — and, indeed, the artist, though the use of this word was somewhat more strict — did not even have to be concerned with art at all. For example, in the eyes of Balzac, Cuvier was a poet, Napoleon was a poet, Jacques Collin was a poet. It was their activity and their aspirations that mattered; the field of activity was a question of lesser importance. With the development of the Parnassian aesthetic, the emphasis shifted: the gifts of the artist — specifically the practitioner of the arts — were considered more valuable than those of the poet. Le sens artiste — the ability to perceive the plastic nature and the formal value of the world — replaced the "feeling for the arts." * Leconte de Lisle, eulogizing Victor Hugo before the Académie Française, apparently disregarded the distinction between artiste and poète when he said that "Victor Hugo is above all a great and sublime poet, that is to say an irreproachable artist, since the two terms are necessarily identical." But this identification of artiste and poète was more a matter of personal conviction than an attempt at exact definition. The poet, Leconte de Lisle was saying, must be an artiste above all, a man passionately devoted to the careful practice of the techniques of his art. Ferdinand Brunetière, studying the lyric poetry of the nineteenth century some few years later, clarified the issue * It was to explain the meaning of the phrase, le sens artiste, that Gautier said, "I am a man for whom the visible world exists," according to the Journal of the Goncourt brothers (Journal, definitive ed., Paris, n.d., 9 vols., I, 141-142).

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ICARUS in the terms of the Renaissance contrast of nature and art: "The poet owes more to 'inspiration,' and the artist to 'study.' " Hugo and Lamartine were merely poets, but Brunetière's beloved Leconte de Lisle was an artiste. Brunetière's definitions and the values he attributed to the two words reflected the usages current in the late nineteenth century. Only a Rimbaud, attempting to revive respect for the semimystical powers of the voyant, could write: "Baudelaire is the first seer, king of poets, a true God. And yet he lived in too artistic a milieu \un milieu trop artiste] . . . " A better translation than "artistic" might be "arty"; but artiste here suggests as well the cult of form prevalent in the eighteen-fifties and the presence of graphic artists in Baudelaire's "milieu." 1 1 Rimbaud's reflections on the world in which Baudelaire lived serve not only to complete this semantic examination of the word artiste. They should also remind us that one can lie with semantics. It is true that Romanticism welcomed the close association of writers with the practitioners of the graphic arts, with painters, engravers, and sculptors, and with musicians.* All the arts were Art, and all artists were expected to march hand in hand. But the efforts of the editors of VArtiste and the proclamations of Théophile Gautier, the poet who originally wanted to be a painter, should not make one forget that it was indeed the poet in the more limited and more commonly accepted sense of the word, the writer (in verse or in prose, to be sure), that was thought to be the artist invested with the highest powers; it was the poet who made the greatest claims. One possible explanation for this fact is that most of our testimony comes from writers, who regarded literature as the highest of the arts — and music, sculpture, and painting as "the lateral arts," * However, Léon Rosenthal, in L'Art et les artistes romantiques (Paris, 1928), insists that the only graphic artists welcomed by poets and novelists were the illustrators, whose work was merely a corollary to that of the writers. I O

Romande Image of the Artist which exercised their appeal chiefly on the senses.12 Literature was said to exercise its appeal on the senses and on the intelligence; and poetry, the most rarefied form of literature, exercised an appeal that was most spiritual, that moved only the most delicate sensibilities. Another explanation, and a surer one, is the fact that the poet had begun to be invested with a certain dignity and respect while the practitioners of the other arts were not yet completely distinguished from artisans. The poet did indeed lead the van in the development of the concept of the artist as an ideal type, a development that took place in the eighteenth century, as part of a larger movement, a shift of emphasis on the components of the human personality which marked the decline of the Rational Man as a common ideal and the emergence of the Romantic hero.* The attempt to deal with the eighteenth century in the limited space of a few pages is a thankless task. The intellectual currents of the Enlightenment were in themselves complex enough; and we still suffer today the effects of the Romantic view which tends to regard the eighteenth century in terms of a simple diagram, a progression from the Cartesian rationalism of the Grand Siècle (which is in itself a simplification) to the emotional attitudes of pre-Romanticism. If we could accept the contention of the young Hugo — that the nineteenth century owed nothing to the eighteenth, that the Revolution formed an unbridgeable abyss between the two ages — our problem would be solved. However, while the history of ideas cannot accept the fallacy of Hugo's statement, the book which would retrace completely the * That the poet "led the van" was especially true of French Romanticism. The German Romantics tended to regard the musician as the supreme artist. In France, on the other hand, the musician did not become particularly important until the Symbolists, in the wake of Baudelaire, discovered Wagner. I I

ICARUS emergence of Romantic attitudes from the eighteenth century, and their gradual fulfillment in the nineteenth, has not yet been written. (Neither, for that matter, has a comprehensive study of Romanticism in the nineteenth century alone.) W e are repeatedly forced to plunge into the thickets of the eighteenth century, to continue the process of clearing paths which have only been partially cleared, and to set up new signposts which may serve as some guide toward the growth of Romanticism itself.* Even when one limits one's self, as I propose to do here, to the study of a single idea, the gradual réévaluation of the poet's gifts and the worth of poetry, one is only too frequently deceived or misled. It was near the beginning of the eighteenth century that Jean-Baptiste Rousseau and Lefranc de Pompignan sang the joys of the poet's life and claimed direct descent from Orpheus, the world's first singer. It was in the closing years of the century, after the growth of the ideas which made possible the poet's emergence as a type to be admired and emulated, that André Chénier addressed to Apollo this qualified prayer: Donne-moi d'un poète, esprit, gloire, génie, Tout, excepté pourtant l'enfantine manie De tel, qui possédé de son docte travers, Inepte et bête à tout ce qui n'est pas des vers, Ridicule jouet d'une verve inquiète, A toute heure est poète et n'est rien que poète.13 * Of the various works which helped me set up m y own signposts, I must mention the late Margaret Gilman's The Idea of Poetry in France (Cambridge, Massachusetts,1958) ; André Monglond's Le Préromantisme français (Grenoble, 1930); Pierre Trahard's Les Maîtres de la sensibilité française au XVlIIe siècle (Paris, 1 9 3 1 - 1 9 3 3 ) ; and Paul van Tieghem's Le Préromantisme (Paris, 1924-1930), especially the essay on " L a Notion de vraie poésie dans le préromantisme européen." That I am trying to cover in a single chapter material which could easily add a companion volume to those four may help to explain w h y I have been forced to adopt a somewhat schematic, and therefore not thoroughly satisfying, method. I 2

Romantic Image of the Artist On the one hand, it is hard to think that Rousseau and Lefranc put much faith in what were essentially frazzled conventions of diction, rather than statements of belief. In the eyes of a society that prided itself on its serious turn of mind, the poet was merely a flute-player. La Fontaine, some years before, had characterized himself as a "papillon du Parnasse." 14 This was indeed reminiscent of Plato's description of the poet, a "light and wingèd thing"; but the phrase suggests flightiness and not spirituality. On the other hand, it was the polygraph Chénier whom the Romantics claimed as their immediate ancestor. Sainte-Beuve even went so far, in the Pensées de Joseph Delorme, as to call Romanticism simply the school of André Chénier. Yet — as witnessed by the fact that the eighteenth century in France produced almost no poetry worth reading — Chénier's prayer was characteristic of a basic attitude of the Enlightenment. "Being nothing but a poet" meant not being a citizen, not being a sociable and adaptable member of society — not being an honnête homme, the ideal type created in the age of Louis XIV and still a model for behavior. It also meant that one claimed — in metaphor, at least — the right to be irrational, to be possessed by Apollo or by the Muses, to receive inspiration as the Christian received grace. The ideal man during most of the eighteenth century was, of course, that eminently rational figure, the philosophe, who carried his rationality so far that he renounced his name and devoted himself to science and social questions, concerned himself with experiential reality, leaving metaphysical speculation to the clerics whose function he hoped to usurp. "The philosophe is not enthusiastic," wrote Voltaire; "he does not set himself up as a prophet, he does not claim to be inspired by the gods . . ." Enthusiasm, the state of being possessed by supernatural forces, was dismissed as a "visceral emotion" or as the prerogative of irrationally violent religious fanatics, 1

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ICARUS the meaning which Shaftesbury gave to the word in his Letter concerning Enthusiasm.1B What the eighteenth century witnessed was another instance of that "ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry" in the name of which Plato had banished Homer from his Republic. And behind this quarrel of the poet and the philosophe stood the problem to the study of which the Enlightenment contributed much of its energy: the battle in the human individual between rational and irrational forces, between such faculties (as the mechanistic psychology of the period put it) as rational understanding and imagination, between states regarded as being as alien to one another as sanity and insanity. The history of the Enlightenment in this regard is often the history of the Enlightenment's undoing. The processes of reason, the wisdom of society and civilization, prepared the way for a rejection of reason and rationality, for returns to a theoretical acceptance of — if not an actual participation in — certain "unsocial," certain "uncivilized" states. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's paradoxes were in reality the paradoxes of his age. Reason, that faculty which, according to the rationalists, distinguished man from the animals and made possible the advances of civilization, was forced to the limits of its own power, and was constrained to acknowledge its own limits. Without concurring in Rousseau's opinion that a thinking man is a depraved animal, eighteenth-century writers from the Encyclopedists on were more willing than, for example, Voltaire to look with other than scorn on the irrational aspects of human behavior. In the preceding century, Pascal demonstrated that reason has limits which reason must come to know; he had abandoned rational processes in the name of a supernatural, divine being, which man could comprehend through faith alone. The movement in the eighteenth century was less a submission to divinity and the spirit than it was

Romantic Image of the Artist a recognition of certain elements in man's constitution that are extra-rational, if not supernatural: they cannot be brought successfully and permanently under reason's dominion. The most obvious instance of this process is the change in attitude toward feeling, marked by a change in the meaning of the word sensibilité. The sensational psychology of the Enlightenment took as its province of study the complex of individual reactions to external stimuli. Sensibilité, understood in its etymological sense, meant merely the potentiality for feeling, for reacting, of the living organism. But the emphasis on the individual reaction, essentially an emphasis on experiential sensory data, took on a moral connotation as the century progressed. Sensibilité came to designate not only the ability to experience nervous stimulation, but the ability to feel in a more refined sense, the ability to react emotionally to moral situations as well as to physical stimuli, an affair of the heart and soul as well as of the nerve-endings. By the end of the century, this degenerated into sensiblerie, the cult of feeling, the search for tender emotions at which the hard-hearted and the hard-headed, the purely rational man, could only laugh. Diderot may have expressed serious reservations about feeling in his Paradoxe sur le comédien; his reservations were, however, unknown to most of the public in the eighteenth century. It is likely that, had they been known, they would have gone unheeded. The readers of La Nouvelle Héloïse, the readers of such importations as Gessner's idylls, Young's Night-Thoughts, Goethe's Werther were, like Sophia Western, only too willing to shed a tear for a tender sensation. The man of feeling, under the guise of the vicar of Wakefield or the vicar of Savoy, replaced the man of reason in the mind and heart of the general public. The attitude which Daniel Mornet has expressed in the phrase "I feel, therefore I am" replaced the Cogito of Descartes.18 i 5

ICARUS This réévaluation of feeling was perhaps the chief paradox of the Enlightenment; it did not stand alone. Other nonrational elements and activities of the human personality were reevaluated as well. The early thinkers of the century, under the influence of Descartes and the English sensationalists, considered genius, like the ability to feel, one faculty of the human machine, a faculty more of the spirit, perhaps, than is sensibility, but no more autonomous. Genius was considered merely a particular disposition of mental forces, of which reason and judgment were the two most important components. The external equivalent to reason and judgment was taste: the man who did not submit his genius to the guidance of taste, the time-tested rules according to which the work of art must be created, could hope to produce nothing but monstrosities, works that could not please because they did not conform to accepted standards. With the passing of the eighteenth century, however, the concept of genius changed. The originality of genius came to be accepted as a necessity: the dominion of neoclassical precepts was questioned, though it was not openly rejected until the Romantics asserted themselves. The term génie came to designate a man instead of one faculty possessed by that man, or, as originally, a tutelary spirit; and the test for genius was no longer simply an adherence to a strict set of rules. It was, as certain passages in Diderot's Salons and Rousseau's article on genius in his Dictionnaire de musique demonstrate, the ability to move and to be moved by the creations of others. When one turns to the eighteenth-century ideas about poetic genius in particular, one finds the same development. A new regard for the imagination was one of the most important factors contributing to the emergence of the artist as an ideal type. The seventeenth century had thought of this faculty as one more likely to mislead man than to help him. i 6

Romande Image of the Artist Texts among Pascal's Pensées treat the imagination as one of the more active obstacles to the development of rational understanding. Malebranche, for whom this rational understanding was the means by which man perceives the supremacy of godhead, censured the "visionaries of the imagination" even more strongly. Voltaire's opinions represent those of the rationalist currents of the Enlightenment: though he went to the trouble of distinguishing passive and active forms of the imagination, Voltaire did not regard either variety with much trust. Imagination, he insisted, must be held under the strict control of the reason that is the mark of the philosophe. Diderot's exact position in this current of ideas is difficult to ascertain; yet it is perhaps safe to say that in his thought, imagination generally assumed an autonomy, a vital force, a creative function, which all but obviated the necessity of its constant subjection to the dictates of reason.* In the last decades of the eighteenth century, imagination took on even greater value for poets and philosophers. Joseph Joubert was able to repeat Plotinus's answer to Plato's denunciation of poets as liars, by pointing out that "the ideal is what can be represented only by a mental conception and seen only by imagination." 17 Truth, he believed, can be found more surely in the works of the poets, the men of imagination, than in those of the philosophers: "Poets have a hundred times more good sense than do philosophers, and the former in seeking the Beautiful find more truths than do the latter in seeking the True." 18 The same line of reasoning served as the rationale for the Génie du christianisme; * A typical instance of Diderot's praise of the imagination occurs in the Salon de 1765 (Œuvres, X , 282): Diderot is discussing the late painter Deshays, and says, " H e had fire, imagination, and verve! H e knew how to set a tragic scene, to place in it those incidents which make one tremble, and to make the atrocity of his characters stand out b y the natural and wellhandled opposition of innocent and gentle natures. H e was really a poet!" It is in such contexts as this that Diderot's use of the word "poet" seems a clear préfiguration of the use made of it by the Romantics.

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ICARUS and it was repeated to the young Romantics b y Victor Cousin. It is fitting that the leading poet of the late eighteenth century, Jacques Delille, should have written a long poem celebrating the imagination as the charm of the universe. Although Delille retained the mechanistic view of the faculties one finds in Voltaire, he attributed to the imagination powers that Joubert merely suggested. It was only through this faculty, Delille claimed, that man ever came to contemplate God: L'Imagination, par un sublime essor, Emporta ses pensers vers le souverain être, L'approcha de son trône, et lui montra son maître.19 Malebranche, some hundred and twenty years earlier, had written that imagination could produce only errors in vision, that the contemplation of G o d is the prerogative of Ventendement, the rational understanding. Reason yielded to a variety of unreason in another w a y that made possible the claims of the Romantics. T h e single basis for all of Romanticism, according to the Académie's official satirist, Baour-Lormian, was the doctrine of inspiration, of poetic enthusiasm. In his scornful discussion of inspiration, Baour-Lormian was reacting to such pallid statements as Lamartine's "L'Enthousiasme," which even the quasi-Romantic Charles Loyson, in his otherwise favorable review of the Méditations, dismissed as a worthless imitation of Lebrun and J.-B. Rousseau. But Baour was reacting with the weight of two centuries of rationalism and common sense. Although the poets of the Pléiade had derived their doctrine of the juror poeticus from Plato, the seventeenth century, while paying lip service to the Platonic doctrines, put its faith in art rather than in inspiration. Boileau repeated Plato's warnings — the poet is born a poet, is influenced by supernatural i 8

Romantic Image of the Artist powers — but his attention was directed more to the art of poetry than to the nature of the poet and poetic inspiration.20 The rationalism of Boileau subsisted in the eighteenth century. The Jesuit authors of the Dictionnaire de Trévoux scoffed at the idea of poetic inspiration as a pagan belief, and the Encyclopédie dismissed it as an allegory, a poetic manner of speech. Voltaire and Shaftesbury, rationalists and utilitarians, simply drained the word "enthusiasm" of any positive meanings it might otherwise have retained. The fear of the idea of poetic inspiration or enthusiasm expressed by the philosophes of the Enlightenment was the rationalist's fear that the man who claims to be possessed by supernatural forces is, as Plato said he was, mad. Plato had made a careful distinction between the madness that is a disease of the mind and those other forms of madness which mark the election and elevation of the human spirit by a divine agent. The eighteenth century lost sight of this distinction; the Romantics themselves would often display the same confusion. The authors who were most willing to give enthusiasm its due were also those who warned most strongly against its dangers. Cahuzac, in the article on enthusiasm he wrote for the Encyclopédie, granted to this irrational state the power of fecundating the poetic imagination and excused in its name the distracted nature and unsociable attitude of the man privileged by a ravishment of spirit.* But he defined enthusiasm as "a sort of frenzy which seizes the mind and masters it," qualified his definition by explaining that such a frenzy "is only a violent fit of madness." A truer, or at * Cahuzac's defense of the unsocial behavior of the rapt poet is especially interesting: "Enthusiasm plunges those privileged men who are susceptible to it into an almost continual oblivion in regard to everything foreign to the arts that they profess . . . But has anyone ever seen any perfect class of men? . . . if you see a man of letters, a painter, a musician, supple, fawning, adept at side-stepping, a clever courtier, don't look for what we call true talent in him."

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ICARUS least a more trustworthy, enthusiasm, he wrote, is one aroused by reason and tempered by reason — a point already made by Voltaire, and one of those paradoxes in which the eighteenth century abounded. Diderot's opinion seems to have been a similar one. While he praised imagination and verve in his Salons, he feared that enthusiasm might be madness, as he indicated in describing the passionate performance of Rameau's nephew: As for him, he noticed nothing; he continued, seized by an alienation of the mind, by an enthusiasm so near madness that it is uncertain that he will recover from it, whether it will not be necessary to throw him in a coach and take him straight to the madhouse.21 It was only at the turn of the nineteenth century that the idea of an enthusiasm which is a true divine inspiration was revived — particularly in the works of Madame de Staël. Corinne, Madame de Staël's portrait of a modem sibyl and a modem Sappho, is convinced that her improvisations are directed by a force beyond her control. She says, in explaining to the audience she has just amazed with a display of her talents, "I think I feel at such times a supernatural enthusiasm, and I know that what is speaking within me is worth more than myself alone . . ." 2 2 Enthusiasm, in this context, clearly lacks its etymological significance: "supernatural enthusiasm" is unashamedly redundant. But Madame de Staël was trying to restore a truly religious aura to the concept of poetic inspiration. In De l'Allemagne she moved still farther in this direction. Her association of poetic enthusiasm with idealism, Christian mysticism, and a vision of universal harmony recalls the Renaissance faith of the Pléiade. The true poet, she maintained, is an inspired man: . . . without the difficulties of language, he would improvise, like the sibyl and the prophets, the sacred hymns of genius. He is 2 O

Romantic Image of the Artist shaken by his ideas as by an event in his life. A new world is offered to him; the sublime image of every situation, of every character, of every natural beauty, strikes his eye, and his heart beats with a celestial happiness that flashes like lightning across the darkness of fate. Poetry is a momentary possession of all that our soul desires; talent makes the limits of existence disappear and turns into brilliant images the vague hopes of men.23 From Madame de Staël's portrait of Corinne, from her description of the true poet, to Hugo's pose as a latter-day Moses, bearing down from the mountaintop odes and ballads instead of the tablets of stone, was but a short step. The image Madame de Staël had in mind, that of the inspired poet-prophet, the vates, recalls another eighteenthcentury idea that mined the doctrines of the Enlightenment from within and prepared the way for the elevation of the artist to the condition of ideal type. The philosophes, in their concern for natural law and their interest in man's immediate and unspoiled reactions to material stimuli, developed an interest in man in his natural state, primitive or savage man. Rousseau, in the Discours sur les sciences et les arts, rejected the questionable benefits of civilization and concluded that man's primitive condition was superior and preferable to the state of civilization. His disciple, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, made similar statements in La Chaumière indienne and Paul et Virginie. In the former, true wisdom is discovered in the bare and primitive hut of a pariah, not in the gilded temples of the Brahmans; in the latter, the departure from an island paradise and a visit to civilized Europe bring unhappiness and destruction to the child of nature. In the wake of Vico, the opinion that the sources of poetry are somehow unhampered in more primitive societies was often voiced. Chateaubriand suggested, in the Essai sur les révolutions, that before lifting a pen, one should transport one's self in imagination to the wilderness, should return 2I

ICARUS for a moment to the state of the child of nature. And Rivarol, according to Chênedollé, declared that the language of the poet and that of the savage are essentially the same, that the poet is merely a very ingenious savage with a wider circle of ideas at his disposition. Both Chateaubriand and Rivarol were speaking during the emigration, at which time — society and civilization having been stretched to a breaking point — the conditions of man's primitive estate exercised special charms on the noble exiles from France. Chateaubriand's pre-Romantic tales of the American Indians grew out of this interest, but their inspiration may be traced to the influence of Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and to the paradoxical investigations of the philosophes.24 One of the concrete results of this interest in things uncivilized was the recognition of a naive national tradition of popular poetry that created the vogue of the genre troubadour. But the troubadours were refined aristocrats, and their poetry is refined indeed when compared with that of the bards and skalds of medieval England and Scandinavia. It was this less sophisticated poetry that benefited most from the reawakened taste for primitive societies and the poetry they produced.25 When Madame de Staël described the inspired poet-prophet in De Y Allemagne-, when Chateaubriand, in René, reported that the singers of songs he had found among the American Indians were of divine race, they had in mind images and concepts originally imported from England — images of the bards, the vates of Anglo-Saxon civilizations. Thomas Gray gave the first example in a short poem, "The Bard," translations of which appeared in France in 1758 and 1764; Gray's Caledonian bard was already the image of the proud and savage and inspired old man:

2 2

Romantic Image of the Artist On a rock, whose haughty brow Frowns o'er old Conway's foaming flood, Robed in the sable garb of woe, With haggard eyes the Poet stood; (Loose his beard, and hoary hair Stream'd, like a meteor, to the troubled air) A n d with a Master's hand, and Prophet's fire, Struck the deep sorrows of his lyre. 28

This dishevelled figure of anger and righteousness appealed more to the Romantics themselves than to the eighteenth century. In 1819, Victor Hugo adapted the situation and the images of Gray's poem: Sur le bord de l'abîme où retentit leur voix, Le vieux chef des Bardes s'arrête. Les frimas sur son front s'élèvent entassés, Sa barbe en flots d'argent descend vers sa ceinture, Il abandonne aux vents sa longue chevelure, E t semble un vieux héros des temps déjà passés. Dans ses yeux brille encor l'éclair de sa jeunesse, On voit se déployer dans sa main vengeresse U n étendard ensanglanté . . P

The tender sensibilities of the pre-Romantic period were more often moved by another image of the bard, by a figure of melancholy enshrouded in mists, the figure of Ossian. The vogue of the Ossian poems in France began with the translation of Macpherson by Le Tourneur in 1777. No major poet except Lamartine was deeply influenced by the material; but the mob of poetasters of pre-Romanticism, who contributed to the Almtmach des Muses and submitted their poems for judgment to the Académie de Toulouse, frequently discarded the classic lyre for the Ossianic harp and painted their Phyllis and Lai's in the pose of the melancholy Malvina. The poems of Fontanes contain many reminiscences of Ossianic influence;28 and Chénier, when he portrayed the 2 3

ICARUS aged wandering Homer in "L'Aveugle," presented him in the guise of the Gaelic bard. T h e writers, Chassaignons and Bonnevilles, who rallied to the cause of the Revolution, learned an important lesson from Ossian: the bard was a leader of peoples, not an idle fluteplayer. T h e early eighteenth century had accused the poet of idleness and uselessness; the authors of patriotic Revolutionary hymns replied that he is one of the most useful of men. T h e preface of a collection of patriotic songs, Le Chansonnier de la Montagne, published in the second year of the Revolutionary government, proclaimed: All the peoples of antiquity were led by poets who, with warsongs, aroused their courage and incited them to combat . . . The Gauls had their Bards; the Fingals and the Ossians still possess in the monuments of our history the tribute of that admiration which even the most cowardly man cannot refuse to the indomitable bravery, to the austere virtue of the free man and the republican.29 Napoleon, one of the most fervent readers of Ossian, learned the same lesson. T h e persistence of the Ossian vogue through the first years of the nineteenth century was due mainly to the favor with which the Emperor regarded poems, paintings, and operas created under the influence of Macpherson's bard. A n d Napoleon's image of Ossian was that shared b y the Revolutionaries, an image of the poet marching at the head of an army. O n his Egyptian campaign, he took his own bard, Parceval de Grandmaison, w h o was to sing in order to rouse the spirits of the troops. T h e religious nature of the bard, his function as God's vicar, was no less highly regarded. T h e identification of poetic inspiration and true enthusiasm made possible an identification of poetry and prophecy passed on to the Romantics from Joubert and Madame de Staël. Chateaubriand, in writing the Génie du christianisme, presented, both in his discussions of Christian poetry and in his own action in writing the book, 24

Romantic Image of the Artist the example of a man of literature, a poet, sounding the call for a return to faith. The late eighteenth century witnessed the revival of several traditions of mysticism and idealism that helped combat the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Mystical illuminism had survived the attacks of Voltaire by becoming a sort of underground movement; the religious revival that occurred in reaction to the godlessness of the Revolutionary leaders and as part of a return to tradition, provided a more orthodox outlet for antirational currents of belief. The entire intellectual atmosphere of the seventeen-nineties, among the émigrés if not in France itself, has been characterized by Baldensperger as the "désaveu des lumières," the rejection of the Enlightenment's rational processes, which were thought to have produced only destruction and chaos. Idealism reappeared as neoPlatonism with Joubert, who claimed to find more truths in the works of the poets than in those of the philosophes.30 The emigration took Frenchmen to Germany and to England, where they had the opportunity to study more closely the sources of influences that had been filtering into France for more than fifty years. In England they discovered a poetic tradition which had never been as strictly submitted to the rule of reason as had the neoclassic tradition in France. In Germany, they learned that the same forces gathering in France had already flowered — had indeed flowered as early as the seventeen-seventies, with Sturm-und-Drang; they saw in Klopstock and Lavater living examples of the vates. What they discovered, essentially, was that the official tradition of French thought and of French poetry was worn out, when it was compared to the living traditions of other cultures. It is a proof of the tenacity of that dead tradition — and of the social and political turmoil that occupied France for thirty years — that a new generation had to be born before the conceptions and attitudes which grew in the eighteenth cen-

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ICARUS tury and were nurtured by a new awareness of the traditions of other countries, could bear any real fruit. But the first results of this new set of attitudes and ideas, of Romanticism, did appear in the eighteenth century itself. The decline of mechanistic psychology, the rejection of the Enlightenment, the revival of religion and of idealism at the end of the century, all contributed to the formation of a new view of the human being. The ideal type was no longer the Rational Man — the honnête homme and philosophe — of the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment. One hesitates to call the new type "Irrational Man"; but he was, at least, the man more willing to pay attention to forces that lie beyond the rule of reason, to consider them as important, even more important than reason and rational understanding. This is the man of feeling, the man of imagination, the man who takes pleasure — and at times a morbid pleasure — in peering into the darker recesses of his mind and heart. It is the type that shortly became the Romantic hero, and of which the artist became, as Romanticism consolidated and developed an awareness of itself, the fullest realization. —

3

—

The Romantic hero made his first appearance as a realized type in certain works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He was not the languorous Saint-Preux, however. He was Rousseau himself. La Nouvelle Héloïse may have appealed to the lachrymose sensibilities of the eighteenth century. Later generations looked with more favor on the Confessions, the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, and the curious dialogues, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques. Rousseau provided in his autobiographical pieces evidence that the new type was indeed a living man and not merely a fictitious creation. He also provided an example of method, a lengthy analysis of the manifestations of the individual personality, the moi, different from the 26

Romantic Image of the Artist personalities of other men and fully conscious of this difference. The ideal types that preceded the Romantic hero held a position completely contrary to that of Rousseau. The honnête homme, as he is described in the works of La Rochefoucauld and his contemporaries, does not stand out at all: he is the man so completely at one with his society that he all but dissolves in that society. He is like everyone else of good breeding and good manners; his aims are concentrated in the desire to associate with and to please others who resemble him. The philosophe subsumed the characteristics of the honnête homme. He stands out more than does La Rochefoucauld's gentleman, but only because he possesses the same characteristics in a heightened form. He is more judicious than the honnête homme, more prone to submit his actions and motives to rational analysis, more aware of the way he behaves. This heightened self-awareness was, historically, his undoing. Carried beyond a certain point, self-analysis and self-awareness can but demonstrate to the individual that he is an individual, that he is not like everyone else because he is an individual, if for no other reason. The stress placed on personal experience by the proponents of sensational psychology resulted in the prolonged contemplation of the self characteristic of Romanticism. The same emphasis, in arousing an interest in the unspoiled and immediate responses of the individual, led to an examination of the self as if it were unaffected by society and culminated in a glorification of the self opposed to society, a moi that dared to be itself and resisted the pressures which produced the conformity and the compromises of the honnête homme. It was no accident that two of the most popular genres of the eighteenth century were the analytic epistolary novel and the confession, fictitious or autobiographical, the confession of Des Grieux or of JeanJacques Rousseau.

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ICARUS Rousseau's first proclamation, and the essential trait of the Romantic hero, is the conviction of difference. He is not at all like other men; he may not be better or worse than they are, but he is not like them. In spite of Rousseau's reservations, the feeling quickly became one of superiority, the belief that a marked individuality, the singularity and originality of the personality, would make one better than other men. Only Rousseau could judge Jean-Jacques; no one else knew him well enough. By the time this belief was assimilated by Rousseau's disciple Madame de Staël, the conviction of superiority had become fixed: no one can judge Corinne — but not because they do not know her well enough. Corinne cannot be judged because the rules and laws that govern the behavior of ordinary men do not apply to her. She is too extraordinary, too far above her society, to be expected to conform to the standards of that society. When Romanticism was fully consolidated, in the eighteen-thirties, the feeling that the superior individual is free from the rules and the judgment of society had become an accepted tenet of the Romantic ethic. The example of Byron strengthened the example of Rousseau; Sandism, Antonysm, and the other quasi-revolutionary doctrines of freedom — and in many cases, of license — were the results. By the eighteen-thirties, the distinguishing marks of the free and superior man or woman were barely questioned: one was simply free and superior. In the eighteenth century, the distinguishing feature of the superior soul was considered, naturally enough, his sensibility. The Romantic hero, as he is reflected in Rousseau's autobiographies, is the man who is better than everyone else because he is finer than everyone else. All men are sensitive; he is hypersensitive. This does not mean, necessarily, that he lives in a constant state of nervous excitement and exaltation, although the minor Romantics, the poètes poitrinaires on the one hand and the Jeunes-France on the other, often interpreted 28

Romantic Image of the Artist hypersensitivity in this way. It means rather that he is more capable of heightened emotional responses than are ordinary men, more prone to display his immediate and spontaneous emotions. He is more sensitive to love, more appreciative of beauty, capable of experiencing deeper sympathy and greater admiration than are others. Rousseau considered himself "the most sociable and the most loving of men" 31 and paraded his need for love and his ability to love through his Confessions. Madame de Staël shaped Corinne as the most remarkable woman in Europe, easily aroused to applause or more solemn admiration by works of art, the beauties of nature, noble actions, the rites of religion; Corinne herself is aware that her gift is a special way of feeling, which she alone possesses. Charles Munster, the Wertherian hero of Charles Nodier's Peintre de Saltzbourg, is a veritable sensorium, moved to rare smiles and frequent tears by the slightest stimulus. Hypersensitivity, it was thought, is a mark of superiority, a blessing to the man or woman distinguished by it, but it is also a curse. The individual gifted with a refined sensibility is proud of his gift, proud of that which distinguishes him as an individual. He cannot help displaying his superiority; even if he wished to do otherwise, he could not conceal his sensitive and sympathetic nature. But in so displaying his sensibility, in being proud of his individuality, in being himself, he must necessarily awaken a hostile response in society. Society is jealous of the superior man, envious of his finer nature, and refuses to accept him for what he is. The superior man will not conform, cannot conform, and thus evokes a hostile attitude and a desire for vengeance in the hearts of his less gifted fellow men. Society persecutes the Romantic hero: he is in some cases a pariah, in others an exile, in still others a martyr — he is always the victim of a jealous and malicious society. Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques is, perhaps, more than any

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ICARUS other the work in which Rousseau concentrated his sense of persecution and his reaction to it. Hostile society had set up a straw man, Rousseau wrote, a hollow mask which it named "Jean-Jacques" and on which it vented its spleen: "If he enters some public place, he is regarded and treated like someone suffering from the plague: everyone surrounds him and stares at him, but still keeping their distance from him and without speaking to him, simply to act as a barrier around him . . . " The call for pity implicit in Rousseau's writing was answered by his disciple, Madame de Staël. Her master was, she wrote in her Lettres sur les écrits et le caractère de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "he whom all sensitive souls ought to defend as their own cause." The image of Rousseau she left to the Romantics was one of an open-hearted, sensitive soul, — "but when that cruel madness of man's injustice and ingratitude overcame him, he became the most unhappy of all creatures . . . " 3 2 In Corinne, Madame de Staël dramatized the ideas she had learned from Rousseau. Her heroine — half-Italian, hotblooded, an enthusiastic lover of the arts, a woman of feeling — is driven to a slow death by her brushes with the coldhearted and insensitive English society in which she tries briefly to live. "There are only two distinct classes of men on earth," Corinne explains to her lover Oswald, "that which feels enthusiasm, and that which scorns it" 33 — and enthusiasm, in Corinne, means both the special, private way of feeling and the creative urge. It was, after all, Madame de Staël who coined the word vulgarité to characterize the unrefined and mediocre attitudes and opinions of the crowd. There were two important corollaries to this theory of the persecuted, hypersensitive, superior man. The first was that the superior individual must withdraw from society, if not literally as Rousseau did, into the solitary contemplation of nature, then figuratively, behind a mask of pride. Uncompro3°

Romantic Image of the Artist mising pride was Chateaubriand's recommendation to those suffering from the condemnation of a hostile society;34 and in René he gave an example of the stoic victim, retiring into himself, defending himself from society with a wall of pride. Vigny's recommendations of stoicism were merely an extension of this pre-Romantic attitude, as were the arrogant poses assumed by others in the nineteenth century, from Petrus Borei to Leconte de Lisle. The other corollary to the sense of persecution was the identification of blessing and curse, of the man chosen by God as the vessel for superior qualities, a refined spiritual nature, and the man accursed, predestined to suffer and to make others suffer, Vhornme fatal. Hypersensitivity, the gift of feeling, was regarded as both a blessing and a malediction. It brings the man who possesses it the rewards of feeling: deeper sensitivity to love, greater appreciation of beauty. But it is also a curse: it differentiates him from others, leads to his being persecuted by others. And, because he is emotionally hypersensitive, he suffers more from this persecution than would the ordinary man. The equation of blessing and curse, of the man chosen and the man fated to suffer, functions in the nature of the Romantic hero as artist with an even greater intensity. The feature that distinguishes the artist from the ordinary man is not merely a particularly refined sensibility; it is his genius, the ability to express himself, the gift of creativity — a power so great that it cannot be learned, but is born with the man, conferred upon him by God. Sénac de Meilhan wrote in 1790 a philosophic parable which illustrates this concept of the curse of genius. Entitled Les Deux Cousins, it relates the fates of Aladin, who receives at birth, as gifts from an evil fairy, a great genius and a profound sensitivity, and his cousin Salem, who is cold and mediocre. The ordinary Salem achieves success and gains worldly power. Aladin, on the other hand, 3 i

ICARUS fails in all he attempts. His cousin points the moral: "The most deadly gift that man can receive from God is a great genius; it offends others and makes us disgusted with them." Society envies and persecutes the man of genius, poet and artist, more even than it does the man of feeling.35 If the example of the sensitive soul rejected and alone was Rousseau, that of the persecuted genius, expiating his creative nature in solitude and suffering, was Tasso. Tasso's name was in the air during the pre-Romantic period. The vogue of the genre troubadour had awakened interest in the chivalric romances, and the revival of religious faith and the new-found necessity for a defense of the throne and the altar had directed attention to the Gerusalemme liberata. In 1796, Baour-Lormian published the first of two mediocre, but popular translations he made of the poem. Shortly thereafter, Madame de Stael's discovery of Goethe's Torquato Tasso assured the acceptance in France of this image of the persecuted poet. In Corinne, she repeatedly compared her suffering heroine to the unfortunate Tasso.36 In De FAllemagne, she analyzed the play and proclaimed her admiration for the Italian poet: Tasso, brave as his cavaliers, in love, loved in return, persecuted, crowned, and dying of grief while still young on the eve of his triumph, is a superb example of all the splendors and of all the misfortunes of a great talent.37 He provides, she concluded, a clearer and more exact example of the poet's destiny than does Rousseau. In the last years of the Empire, the image of the exiled Tasso appeared in poem after poem. Fontanes, consoling Chateaubriand for the adverse criticism aimed at Les Martyrs, recalled "le Tasse, errant de ville en ville" and comforted by the knowledge that his genius could not be taken away from him.38 The Almanach des Muses was sprinkled with poems describing Tasso's death. In 1819, Edouard Mennechet published therein "Les 32

Portrait of Madame de Staël as Corinne by Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun.

Frontispiece to Diderot's Neveu de Rameau (1821).

Romantic Image of the Artist Lamentations du Tasse, stances imitées de lord Byron." The conjunction of the names of Byron and Tasso, during the Restoration, was irresistible. In 1822, Ladvocat finally published a solid, literal translation of Goethe's play, to which Charles de Rémusat contributed a highly favorable introduction. Rémusat repeated Madame de Staël's invitation to artists to contemplate Tasso's fate; his most significant criticism of the play was that Goethe had written it in the interest of the Alfonsos and Antonios, that he had been too hard on the suffering poet. By 1820, the conviction that the artist must suffer was an undisputed belief. Chênedollé had bewailed the fates of Dante, Milton, and Camoëns, and had written, in describing the plight of the Portuguese poet, Ainsi donc, le mortel sublime Qu'aux arts le ciel a condamné, De son propre destin douloureuse victime, A d'éternels revers paraît être enchaîné. Le Génie est impitoyable: Des talents dont il nous accable L'éclat, par l'infortune est toujours expié! Malheur à ces esprits et profonds et sensibles Qui, sur ses autels inflexibles, Une fois ont sacrifié! 39

The discovery had been made that poets in France itself had been left to die of hunger or neglect, had even been executed by a hostile society. Nodier reedited the works of Gilbert, who appealed to the young Romantics as an anti-philosophe, undone by the heartless rationalists he had dared to oppose. Henri de Latouche published a selection from the works of André Chénier, who had been known before only through a note in the Génie du christianisme, a note in which Chateaubriand praised his genius and lamented his fate. Latouche's introduction, "Sur la vie et les ouvrages d'André Chénier,"

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ICARUS was nothing less than hagiology. The editor lovingly described the character of the poet, his bravery and purity, and lingered over the scene of his execution. "So perished this young swan, smothered by the bloody hand of revolution." 40 It was in the vicinity of 1820 also that French poets and reviewers began to mention the name of another young swan crushed by a society which did not understand him, refused him help, and left him to die by his own hand. This was, of course, the marvelous boy Thomas Chatterton. The Chatterton legend was known in France as early as 1786, when Nicolas de Bonneville recounted it in the introduction to his Choix de petits romans imités de Y allemand* Bonneville's version of the story seems to have awakened no interest, however. Familiarity with the life of Chatterton in France may more probably be traced through that precursor of Romanticism, Charles Nodier, to the eccentric Sir Herbert Croft. Croft had been the first to read Chatterton's correspondence with his family and had written a long apology for the young suicide in his epistolary novel, Love and Madness. Nodier, whose fascination with Werther led him to write such tales of self-destruction as Le Peintre de Saltzbourg and Les Tristes, ou Mélanges tirés des tablettes d'un suicide, served as * Philippe L e Harivel, in Nicolas de Bonneville, préromantique et révolutionnaire (Strasbourg, 1923), says that Bonneville saw the Chatterton-Walpole correspondence, but that his interest in the "marvelous b o y " was probably aroused b y his reading Love and Madness, a statement L e Harivel supports b y indicating various textual similarities (p. 129). But Bonneville quoted at length in his essay from William Hayley's Essay on Epic Poetry (1782), from which I should like to cite a f e w lines: . . . look on CHATTERTON'S disastrous end. Oh, ill-starr'd Youth, whom Nature form'd in vain, W i t h powers on Pindus' splendid heights to reign! O dread example of what pangs await Young Genius struggling with malignant fate! N o t only might Bonneville have learned about Chatterton from Hayley; but the last line cited above presents a striking similarity to the title of one of Gilbert's heroic epistles, " L e Poète malheureux, ou le Génie aux prises avec la fortune."

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Romantic Image of the Artist Croft's secretary from 1809 to 1811 and may be presumed to have passed the legend on to his contemporaries. The tale of Chatterton grew, from brief references in Hugo and Charles Loyson, through a lengthy verse monologue by Henri de Latouche — who was, in the eighteen-twenties, an associate of the Romantics and a friend of Vigny's — to Vigny's adaptations of it in Stello and Chatterton, in which the marvelous boy assumed the status of an exemplum, the position occupied in the minds of the preceding generation by Tasso.41 From the elaboration of the image of Tasso, wandering from city to city, to that of Chatterton, draining a vial of poison in a room strewn with his shredded manuscripts, one fact remained constant: the curse of genius, as it was interpreted by the French Romantics, referred most often to the persecution that the artist receives at the hands of a hostile society. As such, it was an extension of Rousseau's attitude, that of the sensitive outcast, attacked by a society that does not deserve him, and suffering more deeply because of the very sensitivity for which he is envied and hated. It was the cry of the misunderstood genius — or, to examine it in a less melodramatic context, that of a group of young artists trying to impose a new vision of the world and a new set of literary conventions on a society struggling to keep alive a tradition that was in reality long dead, and of which the resistance to change was merely the inflexibility of rigor mortis. The Romantics of England and Germany, however, interpreted the curse of genius in another manner, and the French adopted their interpretation with increasing frequency as Romanticism moved on. The artistic genius is accursed, wrote Goethe and Schiller — for it was from their works primarily that the French borrowed the concept — in his very attempt to live. Genius may well awaken the envy and persecution of the men to whom it is not granted; it also renders the man who possesses it incapable of leading the life 35

ICARUS of a normal human being. The theme of Torquato Tasso is not merely that of the exiled poet; it is, as Frau Herder wrote to her husband after a conversation with Goethe, "the disproportion between talent and life." 42 Madame de Staël interpreted this in her own way in Corinne; but she limited its implications. Corinne cannot find love because she has genius: happiness is not for her. Madame de Staël treated the same theme still more sparsely in Sapho, a short play. Here, the poetess is once more unable to satisfy her need for love because she is distinguished from ordinary mortals by her poetic genius. It was Vigny who first suggested in France the broader implications of the idea. In "Moïse" — which may well have been influenced by Schiller's "Kassandra" — he presented the genius, the man chosen and inspired by God, whose nature makes him incapable of living as other men live, of finding the pleasure that other men find, and driven —as were Corinne and Sappho — to a desire for death. After the success of "Moïse," French Romanticism assimilated this interpretation of the curse of genius. The poet, as Antoni Deschamps described him in 1835, is another Macbeth. He is invested with power by supernatural agents and is at the same time accursed: he can sleep no more, suffers when he tries to enjoy the rewards he has been led to expect. The Muse is a Lady Macbeth, urging her consort on to a greatness that is his fatal destiny. His one consolation is that no man born of woman can strip him of his power, can steal his fame. As Vigny wrote in Stello, "The poet's life is accursed and his name is blessed."43 There is yet another way in which to interpret the "disproportion between talent and life," the way in which the eighteenth century interpreted it, which was the source of the quarrel brought to the useless and unstable poet by the seriousminded philosophe. The nature of the artist renders him incapable of performing any actions that do not concern his art,

36

R o m a n d e Image of the Artist said the serious-minded, from statesman to merchant. A t times, the poet would recall the function of the votes and deny the accusation; Romanticism continued to present this argument. It was a frequent source of pride for Chateaubriand that he was able to frustrate the expectations of those who denied his possession of serious purpose on the grounds that he was merely a poet, to prove that a poet could perform the sober functions of a statesman. But at other times, and with increasing frequency as the nineteenth century passed, artists accepted the accusation as a truth and found in it a source of pride. T h e y reinterpreted the apparent curse as a blessing and considered the artist's inability to participate in the life of his fellow men, to share in their occupations, as one more proof of his exalted nature. Michelangelo, Gautier tells us, was unable to lower his arms or his eyes after painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: he remained rapt in his creative activity, in his contemplation of the ideal. "Sublime aveuglement? magnifique défaut!" A n d Baudelaire portrayed the poet as the albatross, capable of braving the tempests, but clumsy and provoking ridicule when forced to walk — "Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher." T h e artist of the Romantic period was as proud of his inability to divert the rush of his genius as was the man of feeling of his inability to stifle his sympathetic nature.44 This identification of the Romantic artist with the Romantic hero is, however, not a completely valid one; or rather, the assumption that the Romantic hero is a single and unified type is false. T h e model type of Romanticism was in reality subject to the influences of two opposite impulses; in given instances, one can even say that Romanticism presented the phenomenon of possessing t w o model types. 45 One was nothing more than the man of feeling of the eighteenth century — deepened, perhaps, by a greater sense of fatality and of impending doom, sick with the mal du

37

ICARUS siècle, a taedium vitae more sinister and more incapacitating than the superficial melancholy of sensiblerie. He was passive and submissive, with a singularly feminine nature. The ultimate desire of this passive type was the dissolution of his self in the world around him; he tended to fade away gently and to die without protest. The type was most thoroughly incarnated in Sénancour's Obermann, whose spiritual and intellectual languor carry him to thoughts of suicide, morbid analyses of his own sensitive and delicate soul. This became, when identified with the poet, the pose of the poètes poitrinaires — "moitrinaires," as Léon Daudet called them 48 — Dorange, Millevoye, Charles Loyson, who sang their swansong to life and gently slipped away. The pose was, however, assumed by poets who had neither the paralysis of Sénancour nor the tuberculosis of the poètes poitrinaires to justify themselves. Lamartine leapt to fame by assuming this pose. He even wrote a "Poète mourant" — after the success of Millevoye's elegy the title was a necessary choice — in which, speaking in the first person, he addressed his farewell to weeping friends and compared himself, as poet, to the bird of passage that leaves behind only its voice and to the Aeolian harp, responding to the most gentle touch of the wind, unable to remain silent though not choosing to sing. Ten years later, SainteBeuve tried to emulate Lamartine, even to outdo him. He modelled his Joseph Delorme on the posthumous publication of the works of Henry Kirke White by Southey, assumed the pose of the poet not merely dying, but dead, and — under an epigraph from Obermann — described the life of the most delicate soul to survive the battle of Classicism and Romanticism. The other model type, subject to the other impulse, was not without sensibility; but the emphasis was not on his delicacy and sensitivity. He was the enthusiast, the passionate and dominant man — Gray's angry Bard instead of Mac-

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Romantic Image of the Artist pherson's Ossian. He proclaimed his masculinity and his active nature in words and deeds; his ultimate desire was to impose his personality on the world, to shape the world — even to create it, to be a new Prometheus. It was the emulation of this type that produced Antony and Vautrin and that led to the pseudo-satanic excesses of the Jeunes-France. The two types did, of course, exist side by side. The same author could present both of them. Goethe had both Werther and Götz; Byron, Childe Harold and Prometheus; Chateaubriand, René and Eudore. The two impulses could apparently be reconciled in the same individual. French Romanticism was able to find a justification for either attitude, either pose, in Rousseau. On the one hand, there was Rousseau the revolutionary, the passionate enemy of society, a Satanic JeanJacques. On the other, there was Rousseau the man of feeling, "the most loving of men" — a Christlike Rousseau maligned and persecuted by evil men, seeking solace in solitude and in the contemplation of nature. The difference, however, between the two impulses and the two types was as frequently felt. Madame de Staël dramatized this difference in Corinne — and heightened her dramatization by a reversal of the sexes. It is Oswald who is the man of feeling, the passive and submissive personality, while Corinne is the enthusiast, overthrowing the rules of society and proclaiming her freedom in every action she performs. Balzac, when he forced Rastignac to choose between the satanic revolt of Vautrin and the Christlike resignation of old Goriot, was merely restating the dichotomy in more general terms. The awareness of this distinction between the passive and active attitudes influenced one of the most important choices made by the artists of the nineteenth century — a choice dictated by the sources from which Romanticism arose, by the conviction of difference, of singularity and originality, one 39

ICARUS associates with Rousseau. It was assumed that this manifestation of individuality could but arouse the hostility and opposition of society. But the artist rejected and persecuted could take one of two stands. He could remain passive and give in to social pressure, either by prostituting himself to established institutions, as does Lucien de Rubempré, or by killing himself, as, it was believed, Chatterton and Rousseau himself had done.47 Or he could assert his activity and individuality, through creativity, and he would be Prometheus; through a disregard for convention, and he would be the Jeune-France or the Bohemian; through the attitude of pride and scorn which became the mark of the Parnassians, the inhabitants of the Ivory Tower of art. The question of what attitude the Romantic artist would assume in the face of society is not merely an academic one; for Rousseau's perception of the antagonism of a free individual and the society of which he must form a part, was heightened for the Romantics by the socio-political developments that occurred during the generations following Rousseau. Much of the concern for the plight of the artist in the nineteenth century was concentrated on a series of attempts to redefine the artist's social status and his social role. —

4

—

The artist may not have been what the Romantics declared he was, an exile, an outlaw, or a pariah; he was however, in a very real sense, a déclassé.™ In the eighteenth century, as in the centuries that preceded it, the artist was essentially a parasite, dependent upon the wealthy aristocracy for recognition and financial rewards. For the artist who was also an aristocrat, this was not even parasitism; art for him was almost an avocation. For the professional artist, the poet or painter who depended upon the success of his work in order to live, it involved a voluntary social displacement. The artist was,

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Romantic Image of the Artist more often than not, a son of the bourgeoisie, the class traditionally associated with commerce, hard-headedness, and a lack of refinement. In choosing the arts as a vocation, he renounced his class and his background and chose to align himself with the aristocracy. As the cases of Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau frequently demonstrate, he was more often tolerated than accepted. With the coming of the Revolution and the assertion of middle-class supremacy, the artist was transformed into a free social agent. The Revolutionary government, the Empire, and even the Restoration, offered a false security: governmental patronage of the arts was repeatedly revealed to be more a convenient method of censorship than a true incitement of creative activity. The painters from whom Napoleon ordered battle-scenes and pompous allegories — the size of which was often specified, down to the decimeter — might well have regretted the equally dependent, but less aesthetically restricted, position they would have occupied before the overthrow of the Ancien Regime. But they were more likely to regard their new freedom with pride: the march of progress had overthrown despotism and ushered in the age of liberty and equality — the artists of the Romantic movement were determined to secure their share of these newly acquired human rights. On the other hand, the artist was faced with a new dilemma. The Revolution had brought into power — and the rapid sequence of governments from 1800 to 1850 only increased this power and made the fact more obvious — the middle class. And it was from the middle class that the artist had divorced himself, in opposition to the middle-class virtues, commercial astuteness, practicality, hard-headedness and often hard-heartedness, that the artist had taken his stand. In addition, it was only from the bourgeoisie that the artist could win rewards and recognition; only by conforming to bour-

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ICARUS geois taste could he make a living. Pleasing the middle class meant, however, pleasing the profanum vulgus — which involved that greatest of crimes, denying one's individuality, prostituting one's genius to society. Surveying the situation in 1830, Balzac wrote, "Many social difficulties are caused by the artist, since everything formed differently from the masses, offends, embarrasses, and annoys the masses." The sensation of difference, of singularity, and the conviction that society is hostile toward any display of originality, received a new socio-economic interpretation. The artist, like the rejected Rousseau, assumed an attitude of hostility toward the middle class which, he felt, was equally hostile to him. The atmosphere of hostility deepened as the century progressed. The portrait of the bourgeois became increasingly grotesque, from César Birotteau to M. Homais, from M. Homais to Tribulat Bonhomet, and from Tribulat Bonhomet to le père Ubu. Bourgeois society retaliated with its own form of humiliation and by the mid-century was calling the artist into court to account for his "immoralities." The pattern of accusations and counter-accusations became a vicious circle.49 The specific cause for this situation was the financial plight of the artist. "Living on one's writing is an undertaking monstrous in its madness," wrote Balzac, for whom the question of finance was a matter of great interest and great poignancy. The commercial values of middle-class society led the bourgeois to ask the artist a single question: is art work? Gautier put it more poetically: "Rêveur, à quoi sers-tu?" The answer given by the bourgeoisie to its own question was the answer given by the utilitarians of the preceding century: art is a useless pastime; the artist serves no purpose at all.50 It was necessary for the Romantics to redefine the function of the artist, to give him a purpose. Even the proponents of art for art's sake participated in this undertaking: the solutions 42

Romantic Image of the Artist to the problem they proposed were not the solutions proposed by a Hugo or a Balzac, but they were nevertheless contributions toward the resolution of the same dilemma faced by Hugo and Balzac. What the Romantics attempted to do was to replace certain social groups which were defunct or losing status. "Top place for the artist! Power for the artist! " demanded the author of an article on the social position of the artist which appeared in 1832. His rationale was that "all the former powers are dead." 51 In particular, the artist assumed the functions of and demanded the rewards reserved for earlier ideal types, the warrior-aristocrat, the leader of men, be he king or teacher, and the preserver of the ideal, whether that ideal be the rational truth of the philosopher or the religious truth of the priest. In earlier ages, the poet had been subservient to the hero in the true sense, the warrior-aristocrat. It was the poet's job to glorify the hero and his consort. Celebrating the "power of Genius" in an ode which appeared in the Almanack des Muses of 1807, the pseudo-classic poetaster, Blanchard de la Musse, asked, "Eh! qui saurait sans lui qu'Alexandre a vécu,/ Et que Laïs était jolie?" Immortality was the gift the poet conferred on the warrior and his lady; his one reward was a reflected glory, a share in that immortality: posterity would know his name. Non omnis mortar, Horace had written; and poets were content with having erected a monument more durable than bronze. More immediate rewards, the rewards showered on the warrior by an admiring world, were to be disdained by the poet: Quel charme auraient pour lui des grandeurs passagères, Des voluptés d'un jour à sa gloire étrangères? Il ne vit qu'aux siècles futurs, D'un posthume laurier l'avenir le couronne, Et l'éclat immortel dont sa tombe rayonne Illumine ses jours obscurs.52

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ICARUS The Romantics did not relinquish this power of conferring immortality and the share of personal immortality that accompanied it. But they were not content with singing that none but the brave deserve the fair, that posthumous laurels are enough to compensate for a lifetime of standing in the shadow of the warrior-hero. "Posterity doesn't bring us any income," wrote Balzac to Madame Hanska. 53 As Goethe's Antonio observes, the poet Tasso presumes to be his rival for the rewards traditionally reserved for the warrior: "Der Lorbeer ist es und die Gunst des Frauen." Both Sainte-Beuve and Alfred de Musset described their generation's yearnings for an equivalent to the triumphs of the battlefield and the feminine favors showered on the conquering hero. The way of the warrior was, however, a dead vocation, as Musset tells us. Napoleon — "the last hero in the old style," Heine called him — was a fallen hero; and with him fell the warrior's way of life. The new bourgeois world would not admit of heroism in the old sense. Byron had tried to combine the glories of the battlefield with those of the creative experience; his example was admired but not imitated. There was really no need for the artist to emulate the hero; he could simply replace him. War, the heroic experience, was subordinated by the Romantics to Art, the creative experience. "Combien Missolonghi domine Sainte-Hélène! " cried Gaspard de Pons in concluding a comparison of Bonaparte and Byron written shortly after the death of the English poet.54 The clearest illustration of the subordination of war to the creative experience is Hugo's "Mazeppa." Mazeppa is indeed the subject of the first part of the poem, which describes the Cossack's dangerous ride on a furious steed and the triumphant ascent to the throne that was his reward for dangers valorously overcome. But Hugo turned this glorification of the warriorhero into the minor term of a comparison, a mere emblem, meaningless without its explanation. The final stanzas of the

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Romantic Image of the Artist poem equate Mazeppa's perilous journey with the poet's adventures as he is carried through the realms of the ideal by that ardent charger, Genius. Hugo addressed himself to the hippogryph on which the terrified poet rides: Il crie épouvanté, tu poursuis implacable. Pâle, épuisé, béant, sous ton vol qui l'accable Il ploie avec effroi; Chaque pas que tu fais semble creuser sa tombe. Enfin le terme arrive . . . il court, il vole, il tombe, E t se relève roi!

Homer sang the heroes of the flesh, said Vigny; the role of the nineteenth century was to sing the heroes of the spirit and of the mind. As the century progressed, the subordination of the heroic experience of war to the creative experience, of action to thought and to the adventures of the mind, became increasingly apparent. Hugo might write that he would have been a soldier had he not been a poet; the thought would not even have occurred to Flaubert. "The artist seems to me the master man among men," he wrote to his mother from Rome in 1851. "I would rather have painted the Sistine Chapel than have won many battles, even the battle of Marengo. It will last longer, and it was perhaps more difficult." 55 In replacing the hero as warrior, the Romantics had also to replace the hero as aristocrat, for the concepts of military glory and titled nobility, as Napoleon himself had demonstrated, were inseparable. In the eighteen-twenties, the early days of organized Romanticism, there was an attempt to supplant the aristocracy by becoming a part of it. Chateaubriand and Lord Byron, poets and nobles, served as examples. The results included Victor, vicomte Hugo, Honoré de Balzac — and Balzac's noble young heroes, Jacob Del Ryès, Horace, duc de Landon-Taxis, Théodore de Sommervieux, Raphaël de Valentin, Lucien de Rubempré.

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ICARUS The aristocracy of blood, however, was losing status as rapidly as was the warrior-caste. Chateaubriand himself could write, in a letter to Madame Récamier, "Talent ought to have privileges. It is the oldest aristocracy, and the most certain, that I know." 86 And Vigny, who had a more certain right to a title than did any of the other Romantics, and who never tired during the Restoration of proclaiming his nobility, noted in his journal: David d'Angers, when he sculpted my bust, wanted to write on it, in spite of me, the count of Vigny. I insisted that my name stand alone, saying that if two or three members of Posterity remembered my name, it would be that of the Poet and not that of the Noble. 57

The Romantics, George Sand explained to Juliette Adam some time in the late eighteen-sixties, constituted an artistic caste which followed a military caste which had in turn followed an aristocratic caste.58 The aristocracy of poets and painters refused to be an idle aristocracy. Convinced as they were that the artist was the highest human type, the Romantics claimed for him the status of the leader of men, the teacher or prophet whose function — indeed, whose mission — it was to direct the march of human progress in which the early nineteenth century believed so firmly. The philosophes of the Enlightenment had already followed La Bruyère into the pulpit from which they preached to society sermons dealing with ethical, religious, and political matters. The eighteenth century had also unearthed the image of the votes, the inspired poet who stands at the head of his tribe, makes its laws, and speaks with the accents of a prophet of God. Ossian and his attendant bards provided an image for the eighteenth century; Romanticism rediscovered the myth of Orpheus. In the legend of Orpheus were combined the poet's mission

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Romantic Image of the Artist as religious leader, celebrant of the mysteries, and social leader, creator of laws and political institutions. Ballanche neglected neither in his prose epic, Orphée. Œagrius, king of Thrace, explains to Thamyris, Orpheus' disciple and Ballanche's narrator, the accomplishments of the legendary singer: He founded the institutions that govern us. He pointed out the signs in the sky, and their relations to the works of the soil. He told us the history of ancient times. He gave us at the same time the religion of tombs, the religion of marriages, the family, the past and the future.59

When Chateaubriand wrote the Génie du christianisme and proved to a society hungry for religion Joubert's theory that the poet reveals greater truths than does the philosopher, that one may perceive the truth more easily by seeking beauty than by seeking truth, he was acting in the role of Orpheus as religious leader, as the preserver of tradition. When he openly opposed the Emperor and went on to accept a ministerial position under the Restoration, Chateaubriand appeared as Orpheus the political guide, leading society to the future. The legend of Orpheus and the very real example of Chateaubriand — and, after his retirement, of Lamartine — served to strengthen the Romantics' pretensions to a position of power in a society that was obviously in need of strong and devoted leaders. Even the melancholy Joseph Delorme dreamed of advice from the patriot-poet Milton: Non, la lyre n'est pas un jouet dans l'orage; Le poëte n'est pas un enfant innocent, Qui bégaie un refrain et sourit au carnage Dans les bras de sa mère en sang. Avant qu'à ses regards la patrie immolée Dans la poussière tombe, elle l'a pour soutien: Par le glaive il la sert, quand sa lyre est voilée; Car le poëte est citoyen.60

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ICARUS Hugo conceived his desire to emulate Chateaubriand at an early age; his fruitless political activities and the mask of starry-eyed prophet he assumed during his exile were two manifestations, political and religious, of his Orphic pretensions. Balzac thought of the Comédie humaine more as a social document than as a work of art; in order to complete by the pen what Napoleon had begun by the sword, he abjured his Swedenborgian mysticism and preached a return to the tradition of the throne and the altar. Vigny declared, through the mouth of Chatterton, that it is the poet's mission to guide the ship of state by reading in the stars the route indicated by God. This messianic pretension, virtually a constant combination of political and religious leadership, was further enhanced by the invitations of the political mysticisms which flourished during the early Romantic period. The Saint-Simonians, for example, published numerous "calls to artists," inviting poets and painters to spread the gospel of the socialist religion, to take up once again the sceptre they had held in earlier eras of social and religious harmony, in post-Homeric Greece and in the Europe of the Middle Ages. The theater, declared le Père Enfantin in 1832, must be the church of the new cult; and Hugo the playwright concurred by proclaiming that the poet has the cure of men's souls. It was this pretension to power that was the most audacious of the Romantics' attempts to redefine the role of the artist in society. It was also the most debated. Almost from the first one finds a counter-movement in Romanticism, a defense of Part pour Part. Victor Cousin had taught that there should be no confusion between the useful and the beautiful; many of the poets and painters of the eighteen-thirties repeated his lessons and his warnings. Eugène Delacroix, in 1831, congratulated the newly founded periodical L'Artiste on its being the

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Romantic Image of the Artist only magazine free of political associations.61 Musset proclaimed proudly that he was a non-political man: Je nrai jamais chanté ni la paix ni la guerre; Si mon siècle se trompe, il ne m'importe guère.62 And Gautier declared, in various poems and prefaces (especially the prefaces to Albertus and to Mademoiselle de Maupin), that moral or political utility means the death of art. It was with the generation born in the early eighteentwenties, the second-generation Romantics, who would become Parnassians and Realists, that this rejection of earlier demands for power triumphed. Hugo continued to act as a messiah; Baudelaire and Flaubert did otherwise. When Leconte de Lisle, doing propaganda work in Dinan in 1848, on the orders of the Club Central Républicain, leaped out of a window to escape the audience he had aroused and angered, he was acting for his generation. Only in a moment of national crisis, in 1870, would he, and Flaubert, and the slightly older Gautier, take part in the political life of France. Even then, it was as private citizens that they acted, not as latter-day messiahs. The Second Empire had destroyed the activism common to earlier Romantics. The function of the artist, as it was conceived by the proponents of l'art pour Part, was to act as the preserver of the ideal in the midst of a materialistic society, to be above all an artiste, a practitioner of and a lover of the arts. Their attitude involved an identification of art and religion, but not in the manner of those who believed in the artist's messianic mission. For the practitioners of art for art's sake, art was itself a religion, a cult that imposed on its adherents a special discipline and brought to the faithful its own rewards. Chateaubriand's identification of art and cult in the Génie du christianisme seems to have introduced the concept to the Romantics.

49

ICARUS Although his purpose was to awaken a recognition of truth, his method was the demonstration of beauty. Many of his readers accepted the means and forgot the end. Flaubert might almost have been speaking for them all when he wrote, "I am a pilgrim to the Holy Land, and I have gone astray in the snows of Parnassus . . . " 0 3 The sense of excitement that accompanied the quarrel of the Classics and the Romantics in the eighteen-twenties, or the belief common to many of the younger generation that orthodox religion was dead, may account for the descriptions of art in terms of cult that one finds in the literature of the period. Sainte-Beuve more than any other poet, perhaps, developed the identification.64 It was he who applied the word cénacle, previously limited to the dining-room in which the Last Supper was held, to the group of artists that clustered around Hugo and whom he described as the disciples, visited by the flaming tongues of the arts.* He compared Vigny, "le poète saint," to John the Baptist, bringing the baptism of art and poetry, — and to Christ Himself, distributing the miraculous loaves to the crowd. He urged him to merit the name of an "Apôtre en poésie." 65 What may have been for Sainte-Beuve merely a rhetorical identification became for the generation of the Parnassians a matter of conviction. Vigny could note in his journal the tendency toward a new faith: "Art is the modern religion, the modern spiritual belief." The young Flaubert, suffering from the disenchantment of the mal du siècle, wrote: If there is on earth, in the midst of all the nothingness, one belief * T h e use of the term — which provided the title and the central image of an important poem in Joseph Delorme — was contested for some years. A . Jay, in his parody of Delorme, La Conversion d'un romantique (Paris, 1830), defined the word in a footnote (p. 53) : "cénacle: in the vulgar tongue, dining room," which was in any event a crime against the H o l y Ghost. Cénacle was not accepted by the Académie Française until 1836, in its supplement to the sixth edition of its dictionary.

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Romantic Image of the Artist that we can revere, if there is something holy, pure, sublime, something that responds to that immoderate desire for the infinite and for the vague that we call a "soul," that something is art. And what was described by Sainte-Beuve as a demotic religion — art to be shared with the crowd — became for the Parnassians a hieratic cult, a mystery, art as arcana to be preserved from the unclean touch of the projanum vulgus. . . . L'impure laideur est la reine du monde, Et nous avons perdu le chemin de Paros, wrote Leconte de Lisle, posing as a new Ecclesiastes and lamenting the passage of beauty from the world. A member of still another generation, the young Stéphane Mallarmé, described the attempt to bring poetry into the lives of the middle class as an "artistic heresy" and recommended that the cult of art be shrouded in a protective aura of mystery.66 At its most extreme, art considered as a new religion developed its own mysticism. "Let us love each other then in Art, as the mystics love each other in God" wrote Flaubert to his unlikely Muse Louise Colet, "and let everything fade before this love!" And as a mysticism, art could have its martyrs. The artist not only devoted himself to the preservation of the ideal; he sacrificed himself in its name. The terminology of Christianity was borrowed to describe the estate of the martyr to the cause of art. This verbal association was characteristic of Romanticism, but it did not wait for the development of a true aesthetic religion to manifest itself. In 1820, when interest in the fate of the poètes poitrinaires was at its height, Viollet Le Duc had mourned the passing of Charles Loyson and had compared the poet's fate to that of the martyr: Du juste, du chrétien le poëte est l'image: Il vit pour les rigueurs, les peines, les travaux; Il meurt! mais il obtient dans un lointain suffrage Des jours purs et nouveaux. 5 i

ICARUS Loyson's reward, as Viollet L e Due envisioned it, was probably a Christian heaven. In the eighteen-thirties, the martyr to art earned his entry to a heaven reserved for artists, what Vigny called "Homer's heaven." 67 The concept of martyrdom to the ideal was, of course, a new interpretation of an older idea, the fatal destiny of the poet. T h e identification was made clear in Baudelaire's articles on Poe. This "American martyr" was invested by Baudelaire with a fatal star, a predestination to suffering. And, Baudelaire proclaimed, thinking in the terms of the cult of art: "I should willingly say of him and of a certain class of men what the catechism says of our God: 'He suffered greatly for us.' " H e went so far as to suggest that poets pray to Poe as an intercessor; and, as his journals show, he followed his own advice. 68 There is a difference between the idea of a fatal destiny and that of martyrdom in art, however. According to the first concept, the artist has no choice. His suffering is predetermined. The martyr, on the other hand, opts for martyrdom. Having decided that the world is an unattractive place, that the triumph of the bourgeoisie is the triumph of ugliness, mediocrity, and injustice, he wraps himself in an attitude of disdain and a rapt contemplation of beauty, and waits for the persecution he is sure he will receive at the hands of the vulgar crowd. It is in the poems of Leconte de Lisle that one finds the conscious choice of martyrdom most emphatically stated. Hypatia — who was for Leconte de Lisle what Hérodiade was for Mallarmé, an image at the same time of poetry and the poet — remains faithful to the gods and to her Platonic idealism, walks forth to be stoned to death by the mob of hideous monks who preach a newer and less beautiful gospel.* * T o my knowledge, no one has yet examined the possible influence of Leconte de Lisle's "Hypatie et Cyrille" on the "Scène" of Mallarmé's "Hérodiade." Leconte de Lisle's poem is in dialogue form; two of his principal

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Romantic Image of the Artist And, in his own name, Leconte de Lisle rejected the faithless modern world and yearned for death: O sang mystérieux, ô splendide baptême, Puissé-je, aux cris hideux du vulgaire hébété, Entrer, ceint de ta pourpre, en mon éternité!69 The artist has passed from a desire to be society's master to that of being its victim; but the persona through which Leconte de Lisle expresses his scorn for life is no less active, no less "Promethean," than the mask Hugo assumed as the Orpheus of the nineteenth century. —

5

—

Having looked at the development and the general formulation of the Romantic image of the artist — the emergence of the artist as an ideal type, his relationship to the less specialized Romantic hero, the various redefinitions of the artist's role — one may turn to the particular images of the artist found in the works of particular writers. It is indeed necessary to look to the statements of the individual writer, for in answer to the question, "Who most fully incarnates the ideal of the artist?" each of the Romantics was likely to say: "I do." Otto Rank's theses — that the individual appoints himself an artist and only afterwards produces works of art as justification of his claims, that artistic creation proceeds from the glorification of the individual personality — are merely restatements of the credo of the Romantics. The image of the artist, in other words, is not some rough conglomeration of ideas inherited from the eighteenth century, reworked by the pre-Romantics, and polished into final shape by the collective characters are the resolute virgin and her nurse. Hypatie does indeed represent both Parnassian poetry and the Parnassian poet, just as Hérodiade does. Like Hérodiade, she departs at the end of the poem, knowing that she is going to her death: "Je vais être immortelle. Adieu!" The question would certainly be worth investigating.

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ICARUS effort of the Romantics themselves. The individual artist's image of himself is, in the end, more significant than the general ideas which I have discussed in the preceding pages; and I mean not merely his image of himself as he is, but also the often idealized persona which he projects both in his published works and in his private notes, letters, and diaries. As François Mauriac has put it: "The most secret diary is a literary composition, an arrangement, a fiction. W e extract from our chaos a harmonious creation, and we take pleasure in it." The nineteenth century carried the pleasure and the pride to be found in one's own singularity to the point of egomania. Much, if not all, of nineteenth-century literature and behavior may be characterized as Stendhal characterized his own life, as souvenirs (Fégotisme. Parnassians no less than first-generation Romantics practiced the culte du moi. The scornful withdrawal into the Ivory Tower was no less an assertion of individualism than was the act of presenting the pageant of one's bleeding heart for public appraisal.70 The works of the Romantics are full of attempts to justify this egomania. Only by being most thoroughly one's self could one hope to move others, said Lamartine and Hugo. Balzac wrote that "an artist is a religion. Like the priest, he would be a disgrace to mankind if he did not have faith. If he does not believe in himself, he is not a man of genius." 71 And Vigny noted in his journal: "An artist should and can love only himself. He is the manifestation of something superior. He is a faculty." 72 These justifications came after the fact. To move from semantics to psychology, from the word artiste to the Romantic glorification of the artist's personality, is to return to the sources of Romanticism itself. The very title of Rousseau's first work, Narcisse, ou Y Amant de luimême, suggests the self-awareness that characterizes nineteenth-century literature, the egomania that marks the modern artist. But Narcissus — who, after all, was content

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Romantic Image of the Artist with contemplating the image that he loved and did not call for the admiration of others — is not the archetype of the Romantic artist. Rousseau's Concessions are more properly Romantic than his Narcisse. The complement of self-contemplation is exhibitionism; the true archetype of the Romantic artist, to take a hint from that indefatigable commentator on the history of Romanticism, Théophile Gautier, is Icarus. On the occasion of a revival of Vigny's Chatterton, in 1857, Gautier cast a long look back to the early eighteenthirties, when Romanticism was at its height, when every new arrival in Paris aspired to be called an artist, when the artist was indeed thought to be the most worthy of men, the natural leader of his society, a worshiper at the shrine of the only true divinity. No ambition, wrote Gautier, was considered immoderate: The fate of Icarus frightened no one. Wings! wings! wings! they cried from all sides, even if we should fall into the sea. To fall from the sky, one must climb there, even for but a moment, and that is more beautiful than to spend one's whole life crawling on the earth.73 The Chorus which witnesses the fall of the leaping Euphorion in the second part of Goethe's Faust had already seen in the young hero's death a reenactment of the myth of Icarus. Joyce, who stands at the end of that Romantic tradition which glorifies the artist's personality as Byron — the model for Goethe's Euphorion as he was the model of the heroic poet for the French Romantics — stood at the beginning, would also choose Icarus as the mythic counterpart to his portrait of Stephen Dedalus. Psychology, I have said, must complement semantics and literary history in our study of the Romantic image of the artist. Dr. Henry A. Murray has suggested that we recognize the Icarus syndrome as a common pattern of character and behavior.74 The desire to fly — the desire to rise above the

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ICARUS crowd, intellectually or socially, and to be admired for doing so — is but one mode of expression taken by individual rebellion, the revolt of the son against his father. Romanticism presents itself as a series of such revolts. The young poets of the eighteen-twenties and the eighteen-thirties claimed that the wings of genius would carry them higher than their elders, the pseudo-classics of the Empire and the Restoration. Welcoming the turmoil of post-Napoleonic France as a fit atmosphere for the triumph of the poet, the young Hugo wrote: L'alcyon, quand l'océan gronde, Craint que les vents ne troublent l'onde Où se berce son doux sommeil; Mais pour l'aiglon, fils des orages, Ce n'est qu'à travers les nuages Qu'il prend son vol vers le soleil!76 Hugo, whose later poetry is often merely an elaboration of these images of flight, is perhaps the best example of the "ascensionist" type, as Dr. Murray has characterized those who live under the sign of Icarus. But as Gautier tells us, Hugo's contemporaries — often enough, his emulators — also hoped to soar above the profanum vulgus and the realities of nineteenth-century life. Later generations of Romantics were no different. Baudelaire's "Élévation" describes the soul's flight to the purity of the upper air, a theme treated somewhat frivolously in Banville's "Le Saut du tremplin," in which the artist appears as a clown unsatisfied with the confined space of his circus tent: Enfin, de son vil échafaud, Le clown sauta si haut, si haut! Qu'il creva le plafond de toiles Au son du cor et du tambour, Et, le cœur dévoré d'amour, Alla rouler dans les étoiles.76

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Romantic Image of the Artist Edmond de Goncourt's short novel, Les Frères "Zemganno — an account of the literary ambitions he shared with his brother Jules, transposed into the story of two acrobats — also portrays the artist's triumph as a prodigious leap from a springboard. In a more serious vein, Leconte de Lisle called upon man to fly into the realms of the ideal, out of scorn for the limitations of matter and of the bourgeoisie: Mieux que l'aigle chasseur, familier de la nue, Homme! monte par bonds dans l'air resplendissant. La vieille terre, en bas, se taît et diminue.77

And the young Mallarmé, sick with the stupidity of mankind and the burden of the flesh, tormented by fears of poetic sterility, stared through his reflection in the glass of hospital windows at the sun above: Est-il moyen, ô Moi qui connais l'amertume, D'enfoncer le cristal par le monstre insulté Et de m'enfuir, avec mes deux ailes sans plume — A u risque de tomber pendant l'éternité? 78

The same thought occurred to Nerval in his descent to the underworld to force the gates of memory, and to Rimbaud, whose trip through a violent sea was another manifestation of the Icarian flight. Yet Mallarmé's fear of falling and Rimbaud's decision to return to the safety of a tiny puddle are in themselves Icarian, as Gautier's account suggests: "To fall from the sky, one must climb there . . . " Dreams of falling, Gaston Bachelard has written, reflect "a sort of diseased way of envisioning ascension, the inexpiable nostalgia for height." The falls incurred by Satan and Prometheus, the heroes of Romantic titanism and the rivals of God, form parallels to the risk taken by Icarus in his attempt to reach the sun.79 The fear of falling, which would never have entered Hugo's mind, serves as a reminder that — the prototype of 57

ICARUS Icarus notwithstanding — the image of the artist and Romantic egomania did undergo a transformation in the middle of the nineteenth century. When, in Charles Demailly, the Goncourts said of their fictional portrait of Flaubert that "deep within him growls and yawns the anger and the boredom of his vain assault on some sky," they were taking note of that transformation. The great adventure which the poets of the eighteen-thirties found in the life of art became the lost illusion of the Parnassians and Realists. Romantics of the second and third generations did not always think of themselves as complete realizations of the ideal type. In Freudian terms, they had made a distinction between the ego and the ego-ideal. But, if Bachelard is right, if the nostalgia for the Icarian flight is equivalent to the flight itself, then Baudelaire's worship of Poe and Hugo's cult of himself were identical. A man may manifest his ideals in his aspirations if not in his actions.80 The French Romantics, then, actually reenacted the full myth of Icarus, the flight in the ambitions and experiments of the first Romantic generation — that of Hugo and Balzac, of Berlioz and Michelet — and the fall in the minds, if not in the works, of the second and third generations, who saw a social decline in the Second Empire and a moral decadence in the state of mind of their contemporaries. If for no other reasons than the self-conscious exhibitionism of the Romantics and their awareness of the full pattern of their age, the myth of Icarus seems especially appropriate for the nineteenth century, although one could with reason argue that it seems just as appropriate for the Renaissance. Leonardo dreamed of a flying machine; Ariosto multiplied in his epic images and instances of actual flight; Marlowe, according to Professor Harry Levin, is indeed the prototype of the Icarian artist, the "overreacher." But if Dr. Murray's theories are correct, then the Icarus syndrome is with us continuously; the

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Romantic Image of the Artist significance of the myth of Icarus, however, is renewed in every age, and, in spite of the isolated case of Marlowe, the Romantics did give a new significance to the myth. The identification of Icarus with the artist — an identification clearly made by Goethe, Gautier, and Joyce — is peculiar to Romanticism.* Behind all the masks assumed by the authors of the nineteenth century was the archetype of Icarus. Even when the mask was that of an Orpheus or a Prometheus, a Satan or a Narcissus, the face behind the mask was the face of Icarus, the Romantic artist as Romantic artist. In striking his pose, in creating his persona, the Romantic emphasized one or more of the concepts that composed the general image of the artist — his own attitude toward the fatality of genius, his own impulses toward Promethean domination or Wertherian passivity; and one or more of the roles proposed for the artist by Romanticism — hero, aristocrat, leader of men, preserver of the ideal, martyr. He never tired of proclaiming his originality, his accomplishments, his contributions to the body of literature. Virtually no one in the nineteenth century would represent himself as a "butterfly of Parnassus" or as a "flute-player." The Romantic artist was more likely to emulate Icarus and to pose as a soaring eagle, to occupy himself by blowing his own horn. * I make this statement in full knowledge of an isolated passage from Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, which Professor Edward J. Geary was kind enough to point out to me. In his "Ode sur la naissance de monseigneur le duc de Bretagne" {Odes, Book II, i), a reply to La Motte's preface to his Odes, Rousseau celebrates the power of his own poetic frenzy; he imagines the possible criticism of such enthusiasm: Mais que fais-tu, muse insensée? Où tend ce vol ambitieux? . . . Réprime une ardeur périlleuse: Ne va point d'une aile orgueilleuse Chercher ta perte dans les airs; Et par des routes inconnues, Suivant Icare au haut des nues, Crains de tomber au fond des mers. The Romantics preferred another Rousseau, and these lines from JeanBaptiste seem to have created no particular stir.

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Chapter

II

The Orphic Mission of Victor Hugo T o think of French Romanticism is to think of Victor Hugo. More than any other French writer of the nineteenth century, Hugo associated himself with Romanticism considered as a movement, as a body of ideas and techniques. Not that he was really more aware of his role as an innovator than was Lamartine, or Vigny, or Balzac; in fact, he was often a follower rather than a leader, a gleaner of the grain that had been sowed by others. But Hugo was conscious of his position as an early associate of the Romantic movement and an associate who remained faithful to the cause for the whole of a career that spanned almost three generations. He was aware of his position as a rallying point for both men and ideas. He "collected" the poets and painters who formed the first cénacle; he assembled and heightened, as in the preface to Cromwell, concepts created by other men, ideas waiting to be shaped and to be presented to the public in a dramatic form, with vigor. And, like the usual Icarian type, he was from the first extremely ambitious, intent on achieving recognition and success in public life. Hugo fulfilled, as did none of his contemporaries, the definition of the man of genius suggested by Gautier's

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Victor Hugo self-denigrating hero, d'Albert: he was the self-assured titan, breaking through all obstacles, single-mindedly oblivious of the trail of mistakes he left behind him. Hugo's own personality was his first and most important weapon. H e managed to reconcile what were apparently irreconcilable elements and opinions, to impose a sense of coherence and continuity on the vagaries of his sixty-year career, by the titanic force, the sheer immensity of that personality. It was not, of course, the personality of Victor Hugo the man, which may have been as petty and as irritating as everyone from Balzac to Bire said it was, as profoundly troubled as Guillemin has suggested in his study of Hugo and sexuality. His force lay rather in his literary personality. As a lyric poet, as a writer of prefaces and articles, Hugo created for himself a persona. In his poetry and in his prefaces, he invariably manifested this legendary self, this artificial emanation of his true personality. 1 Hugo was aware that he was creating a mask through which to speak. Among his papers is a fragment, a few lines that would have formed part of the preface for a volume to be called Les Contemplations cTOlympio. "Olympio" is the best-known name of Hugo's persona; he explained his assumption of it by saying that "at that moment in his life when his horizons are growing ever broader, a man feels too small to continue speaking in his own name. Poet, philosopher, or thinker, he creates a persona in which he represents and embodies himself. It is still the man, but it is no longer the private personality."* 2 And, near the end of his career, he revealed the process to his public. In 1880, in the preface to the definitive edition of Odes et ballades, he wrote: Every man who writes writes a book; this book is himself. * In both this quotation and the following, the word I have translated as persona is the French figure.

6 1

ICARUS Whether he knows it or not, whether he wishes it or not, it is true. From every body of work, whatever it may be, wretched or illustrious, there emerges a persona, that of the writer. It is his punishment, if he is petty; it is his reward, if he is great.3 It was Hugo's good fortune that many of the events of his life could not have been better designed as bulwarks for the image of himself he created and projected in his works. He was fortunate in the accidents of his domestic life, in the twenty years of exile he passed on the Channel Islands, in the fact that he outlived his family and his early literary associates — Hugo stood firm, it seemed, while all things passed. He was even fortunate in possessing a high forehead, for such a forehead, the French learned from Lavater, was an indication of great genius. Hugo's "front de génie" was celebrated by Sainte-Beuve in his Consolations, was envied by the young Romantics of the eighteen-thirties, and was preserved in art, maliciously exaggerated by Daumier.* "One must create one's own life, as one creates a work of art," d'Annunzio's decadent Andrea Sperelli learns from his father, a Byronic Romantic.4 Hugo thus adopted the gifts of nature and of fate and worked them into his mask.

His entire poetic method was a manifestation of that persona, a definition of self. All his work answered the question: "What manner of man art thou?" The answer, as the Ancient Mariner's own tale illustrates, included the experiences through which the self had passed as well as the qualities of the personality. * Daniel Jovard, the hero of Gautier's satirical tale "La Conversion d'un classique," shaves an inch or two of his forehead in order to have a "front de génie." And Balzac wrote in Modeste Mignon (1844): "Victor Hugo's forehead will cause as many skulls to be shaved as Napoleon's glory caused unripe marshals to be killed."

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Victor Hugo This was, in one sense, simply the method of Romantic lyricism, which arose from the eighteenth-century concern for the workings of the individual sensibility, the states of the individual soul. Lamartine, in a preface he wrote for the Méditations in 1849, said that he had used such a method. Poetry for Lamartine was an internal song — "These poems were the moan or the outcry of a soul." And, he continued, this was the reason for his success. "The public heard a soul without seeing it, and saw a man instead of a book . . . He went straight to the heart; sighs were his echoes, tears were his applause." The magnetic rings said by Plato to bind the rhapsode to his audience were transformed into the bonds of sympathy. The poet gave voice to the cry of his heart and reached his public by reaching himself.5 Hugo, at times, explained his lyricism in the same way. "Everyone finds his own identity in the identity of the poet," he wrote in his notebooks. Later, in the preface to Les Contemplations, which he presented as the record of a single soul's development, he answered the imaginary objections of the public by saying that the story of his own life was that of the reader's. "Alas! when I speak to you of myself, I am speaking to you of yourselves. How can you not feel this? Oh, what a fool you are, to think that I am not you." But elsewhere in the same volume, Hugo admitted of a difference between the poet and the ordinary man: "Il est génie, étant, plus que les autres, homme." The poet feels more deeply, lives more deeply, than do other men. Hugo may have pretended to be a mirror-image of his reader; more often, he insisted on that which distinguished him from others. His family device was Ego Hugo; his method was an extension and amplification of the device. The characteristic phrases of his poetry are "Je suis . . . " and "Je suis celui qui . . . " He posed before the public and defined himself for his readers.8

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ICARUS The definition and the pose are not those of the ordinaryman, but of the poet. The poet — Hugo agreed with Goethe's Tasso — is the man who has the gift of speaking what he feels, while other men must suffer and live in silence. Beyond this pose as a poet, Hugo presented himself as the poet — the image of the poetic genius shaped by the ideological currents that made Romanticism, according to which the poet is a man possessed with supernatural powers, a man chosen, imbued by the sense of a mission for the accomplishment of which he is responsible. The most apparent result of this method and this image, and an accusation from which Hugo cannot escape, is the Icarian display of egomania. Mrs. Trollope was shocked by the self-assured and self-centered tone of Hugo's prefaces, a tone "which, all things considered, is perhaps unequalled in the history of literature." Heine, who despised Hugo, wrote in Lutezia that "he is an egoist, and what is still worse, he is a Hugoist." And an anonymous critic, reviewing William Shakespeare for the Revue de Paris, suggested that Hugo had misnamed the book, for which he proposed the title Moi.1 But the egomania of a genius is not the egomania of the ordinary neurotic. Leconte de Lisle was more correct than the irate Mrs. Trollope when he wrote that what was attacked as pride in Hugo was actually "the pure and simple avowal that he is Victor Hugo. Which is indisputable." W e may with reason borrow the phrase with which Keats characterized Wordsworth. Hugo's persona, like that of Wordsworth, is marked by the "egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone . . . " The true significance of Hugo's method of self-explanation lies beyond egomania. When he wrote the words "I am" and elaborated upon them, he was not merely calling for public adulation; he was asserting the existence of a stable point, something which "stands alone," in the midst of movement, of flux, of chaos.8

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Victor Hugo From the first, Hugo's work reflected a world that is in constant movement, a world about to be lost in the chaos of clashing forces. In 1820 the poet was aware of the stormy political realities of France, of the confusion produced by the death of an age, by the deaths and births of various faiths. In the eighteen-thirties, his vision expanded to encompass the political confusion of Europe. He became aware of the uncontrolled profusion of the natural world outside man and the rage of passions within him. Later, his awareness spread to the whole of human history, the progress of the race; and he looked beyond, to the mysterious forces and purposes of the universe to which human history is subjected. In the midst of this chaos of events, of images, of passions, and of purposes stands the poet, Victor Hugo. Explaining in 1830 the variety of his works, which had already included novels and odes, satires and melodramas, songs and manifestoes, he wrote: C'est que l'amour, la tombe, et la gloire, et la vie, L'onde qui fuit, par l'onde incessamment suivie, Tout souffle, tout rayon, ou propice ou fatal, Fait reluire et vibrer mon âme de cristal, Mon âme aux mille voix, que le Dieu que j'adore Mit au centre de tout comme un écho sonore! 9

The crystal soul, the poet's consciousness, may vibrate sympathetically to all the internal and external stimuli that impinge upon it; but, by repeatedly defining and thus asserting the nature and the existence of his self, he is able to concentrate the chaotic rush into a still center, to reflect the chaos through the order of his own personality and his art. "I am a consciousness," 10 wrote Hugo in 1880;* this assertion was * Hugo's phrase was: " J e suis une conscience." I have rendered "conscience" as consciousness, since that seems to me to be the strongest meaning of the word in this instance. But the French "conscience" always carries as well the meaning of the English conscience: Hugo's phrase suggests a moral awareness as well is an intellectual one.

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ICARUS his defense against the terrors of universal life and mystery. The order asserted by the poet is not, however, an order imposed on the world by Victor Hugo the man. It cannot be said of him what Wallace Stevens says of the singer at Key West, that "there never was a world for her/ Except the one she sang and, singing, made." Hugo's conviction was that somewhere in the chaos of history, nature, and mysterious universal forces, there is an order and a meaning created by God. Furthermore, he believed that there are men chosen by God to perceive that order and whose responsibility it is to reveal the order they have discovered to the mass of men, unable, if unaided, to sense the meaning behind the apparent chaos. The man so privileged is the poet; he is God's vicar, God's elected. The proof of his mission is found in the fact that he does not choose his role of poet — "The wind bloweth where it listeth." 11 He is subject to divine inspiration.* Hugo's work of the eighteen-twenties contained the usual Romantic images of inspiration; after 1830, his sense of mission consolidated. He wrote to the critic Victor Pavie in 1833, "It is either great impiety or great piety, but I believe that I am fulfilling a mission . . . " 1 2 Impiety or no, the conviction that he was inspired by God to perform a task set by God grew steadily throughout the rest of his life. He was • T h e identification of poetic inspiration with the descent of grace was a common one among the Catholic Romantics of the eighteen-twenties. One might compare Hugo's " A M . Alphonse de L . , " published in Odes et ballades and dated October 17, 1825, in which occur the lines: . . . ta bouche est inspirée! L e Seigneur en passant t'a touché de sa main; Et, pareil au rocher qu'avait frappé Moïse, Pour la foule au désert assise, L a poésie en flots s'échappe de ton sein! T h e passive vision of the poet as a recipient of divine inspiration led Alexandre Guiraud to extend the image of the Aeolian harp and to refer to Christian poets as "cythares du très-haut" ( " L e Poète," in Poèmes et chants élégiaques, 1824). T h e very title of Lamartine's volume Harmonies poétiques et religieuses testifies to the concept of a poetico-Christian inspiration.

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Victor Hugo able to present the image of a man moved as the prophets were moved: Je sens que par devoir j'écris toutes ces choses Qui semblent, sur le fauve et tremblant parchemin, Naître sinistrement de l'ombre de ma main. Est-ce que par hasard, grande haleine insensée Des prophètes, c'est toi qui troubles ma pensée?

And he answered his own question: Je sens le souffle énorme Que sentit Élisée et qui le souleva; Et j'entends dans la nuit quelqu'un qui me dit: V a ! 1 3

Hugo's way of posing before the public thus reveals his image of the poet. Hugo, as the realization of the ideal type, is the voyant, the entendant — the crystal soul that vibrates sympathetically to the forces of the world. He stands at a fixed point, straining to see, to hear and to concentrate the images and the sounds of humanity, of nature and of various supernatural powers, in order, finally, to perceive the significance behind these forces, the meaning for which they are symbols. Hugo's greatest claim is that he, as the poet, will be able so to examine and so to order these forces that they will point to the ultimate mystery, the ultimate meaning, the ultimate order, which is God. The "I am" uttered by the poet, the definition of self, points to the "I am" spoken by God, for the power which moves and inspires the poet is the power of God. In terms of Romantic mythology, Hugo was reenacting the myth of Orpheus. He displayed the sense of Orphic mission, with all its necessary attributes: the conviction that he was the recipient of divine inspiration, that his task was to be performed with divine sanction, and that the task was an obligatory one. Election entails responsibility. The mission itself, as Hugo conceived it, is multiple. It 67

ICARUS contained all the functions of Orpheus as Ballanche described them in Orphée, as they were in the air of the early nineteenth century.14 Hugo was the voyant who saw three visions, the entendant who heard three voices, those of humanity, of nature, and of mystery. "The complete poet," he wrote later in his life, "consists of these three visions: Humanity, Nature, and the Supernatural." 15 These correspond exactly to the three functions of Orpheus: to civilize men by establishing political and educational institutions; to reveal nature to them, nature considered in its two aspects — as the material world and as a collection of symbols pointing to a meaning beyond mere matter; to reveal to them the mysteries by "reading" the symbols of nature, by attending to the supernatural forces of the universe and thus to indicate the routes ordained for man by God, and, finally, to make possible the perception of God Himself. This Orphic mission is, of course, an outline that must be filled with more specific activities. Hugo's idea of his role as poet was colored by the Romanticism in terms of which it was couched, by the political realities of France and Europe in the nineteenth century, and by the demands of that individual personality which concentrated and revealed, and through which the mass of men were to see what they could not see alone, that is, the personality of Victor Hugo. One cannot insist too much that the sense of his mission was present in Hugo's thought and work almost from the beginning. The changes along the way were due to his broadening the scope of his vision, which entailed shifts of emphasis, and to the ever-increasing sense of mystery, which came to the fore in the eighteen-fifties and dominated the last thirty years of Hugo's life. Studying Hugo's elaboration of the Orphic image of the poet thus means studying his entire career. But the voices, or the visions, did appear in a specific order, an order that seems to reflect both a desire to

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Victor Hugo see man's place in an ever-widening universe and the progression of the Romantic sensibility through the first half of the nineteenth century. 2

The first voice Hugo heeded was that of humanity, calling the poet to accomplish his role as civilizer by taking part in political activity. This was the function of the bard, which had been rediscovered in the eighteenth century; for the young Hugo, it was, more precisely, the way indicated by Chateaubriand. Whether or not Hugo actually wrote, in a notebook-diary he kept in 1816, "I want to be Chateaubriand or nothing," 18 he certainly thought it. He made his appearance, in the early years of the Restoration, as an imitator of Chateaubriand, a Catholic, and a monarchist. This program of traditionalism presided over the founding of Le Conservateur littéraire, a periodical largely written and edited by Hugo and his two brothers, Abel and Eugène, and intended to be a sister-organ to the Catholic-monarchist Conservateur. In the first issue, Hugo took his stand. In a satire entitled "L'Enrôleur politique," he answered the invitations of liberals who promised literary fame by proclaiming his fidelity to the king's cause, fidelity unto exile, fidelity unto death.17 In later issues, he clarified his position. "Les Derniers Bardes" (1819) was an adaptation of Gray's "The Bard," in which Hugo described the angry tribal poet, braving the English invaders who had killed the Caledonian warriors and plunging into a rocky abyss after having cursed the English king. "Le Poëte dans les révolutions" (1821) contained a more realistic statement. The poem is a dialogue between the Poet and a voice of discouragement, which points out that the Poet is young, that there is no room for an Orpheus in the modern world, that men will never change. The Poet answers 69

ICARUS by describing his role. He insists that he must take part in social action: Parmi les peuples en délire, Il s'élance, armé de sa lyre, Comme Orphée au sein des enfers. Like the ancient bards, the modern Poet must be capable of the heroic action of self-sacrifice: Le poëte, en des temps de crime, Fidèle aux justes qu'on opprime, Célèbre, imite les héros; Il a, jaloux de leur martyre, Pour les victimes une lyre, Une tête pour les bourreaux.18 It is his function to lead men to justice and to peace, even if he must die in the process. Orpheus and Gray's brilliant-eyed bard yield to a more recent political poet, André Chénier. In 1820, Chénier was the prime example of heroic devotion on the part of a poet — the right devotion, since he had sacrificed himself to the Revolutionary principles rejected by the young traditionalists of Romanticism. Hugo was clearly thinking of Chénier: the epigraph of his poem is taken from the ïambes. He was thinking of the ïambes also when he wrote that in moments of crisis and of crime, "La Muse devient l'Euménide." The poet's function is that of avenger, pursuing the guilty, fixing their guilt and his accusations in his poems. Both "Les Derniers Bardes" and "Le Poëte dans les révolutions" were republished in 1822, in Odes et poésies diverses. The volume was, like the Conservateur littéraire, shaped by Hugo's desire to emulate Chateaubriand and the bardic role he had assumed. He took his epigraph from Lamennais: "Something drives me to raise my voice, and to call my century to judgment." The preface of the work indicated the

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Victor Hugo double nature — political as well as literary — of the author's inspiration and restated his stand as a supporter of the throne and the altar. The preface to the second edition, published the following year, explained more clearly the poet's intentions: he tried, wrote Hugo, "to celebrate some of the major memories of our age which may serve as lessons for future societies." As he wrote in 1828, Ainsi d'un peuple entier je feuilletais l'histoire! Livre fatal de deuil, de grandeur, de victoire. His subjects included such events as the death of the Duke of Berry, the funeral services of Louis XVIII, and such figures as the heroic Mademoiselle de Sombreuil,* the new king Charles X, and the living scourge "Buonaparte" [rie]. He fulfilled his mission by heeding the voice of history and by trying to hear the lesson proclaimed through the sounds of battle and the shouts of victory.19 Other texts of the period illustrate Hugo's state of mind. Reviewing Quentin Durivard in 1823, he praised Walter Scott's defense of the throne and the altar and asked, "And who will dedicate himself, if not the poet? What voice will arise in the storm if not that of the lyre which can calm it?" But Hugo was not always so pacific. The same year, 1823, saw statements of a certain military fervor; he envied, he said, his father's sword and wrote: J'ai des rêves de guerre en mon âme inquiète; J'aurais été soldat si je n'étais poëte. This bellicose quality was one that Hugo never lost; in 1870, when he was far too old to fight, he took pleasure in the fact that he was the namesake of a French cannon.20 In 1823, also, Hugo announced his sense of mission. "Le * According to a widespread legend, Mlle de Sombreuil, while a prisoner of the Revolutionists in the early seventeen-nineties, was forced to drink a glass of human blood.

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ICARUS Poëte" described the august bard, whose flaming eyes proclaim his election by God. Un jour vient dans sa vie, où la Muse elle-même, D'un sacerdoce auguste armant son luth suprême, L'envoie au monde ivre de sang, Afin que, nous sauvant de notre propre audace, Il apporte d'en haut à l'homme qui menace La prière du Tout-Puissant. 21

The day had not yet arrived for Victor Hugo. After the various editions of the Odes, Hugo devoted himself more to literature than to politics. A major concern of the period was the quarrel of the Romantics and the pseudoclassics, and Hugo took his place as the self-announced chief of the new movement. His next two volumes were presented to the public as the works of an humble poet. Hugo clearly announced that the first, Les Orientales, was a work of pure poetry. The only question the reader should ask, he wrote in his preface, was: is the volume a true work of art? He posed, in "Enthousiasme," as a sensitive spirit, moved by the slightest breeze. But the poem opens with the poet's statement that he wants to ride to Greece on a dashing charger, to fight for liberty — in other words, to imitate Lord Byron. Pure poetry though it may be, Les Orientales still contains the expression of that same bellicosity Hugo had displayed in his earlier works. The same contradiction appears in Les Feuilles d'automne (1831). The volume, as Hugo wrote in his preface, is composed of domestic pieces: it was designed as an island of calm in the midst of the stormy sea of the Revolution. Yet the last piece, "Amis, un dernier mot," cancels the impression of calm domesticity created by the bulk of the volume. Hugo proclaimed in it his change in attitude:

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Victor Hugo Je suisfilsde ce siècle. Une erreur, chaque année, S'en va de mon esprit, d'elle-même étonnée, Et, détrompé de tout, mon culte n'est resté Qu'à vous, sainte patrie et sainte liberté!22 Under the resounding words Hugo was saying that he was no longer an apprentice Chateaubriand. He went on to associate himself with the revolutionary movement that was sweeping from Greece to Poland, to Ireland, to Portugal, and to reassert the function of avenger to be performed by the poet: "Et j'ajoute à ma lyre une corde d'airain!" The early eighteen-thirties witnessed the emergence of the new Hugo, the Hugo for whom the day had come, the Hugo who had abjured the throne and the altar in favor of the Revolution and certain socialistic tendencies — though he was not to become a true socialist for some twenty years. The change in attitude was that of Romanticism itself. In the eighteen-twenties it was — in spite of the liberalism of the Globe — largely a Catholic-monarchist movement. In the eighteen-thirties it became rather a popular social movement. Lamennais turned in this direction, and even the aristocrat Vigny wrote a workers' hymn. This shift in political allegiance was probably the result of a clear invitation. The socialist movements of the period flattered artists, wooed them, did their best to attract them to the popular cause. The Saint-Simonians, for example, insisted that the artist's role was "a veritable ministry," a mission, an obligation.23 Artists were invited to form an avant-garde, to convert the nation to the doctrine of Saint-Simon. The artist, wrote Émile Barrault, is alone capable of directing society, for he alone embraces both God and mankind.24 Hugo seems to have responded wholeheartedly to this call: his ideas, even the expressions he chose, were those of the Saint-Simonians. Enfantin, in 1832, declared that the theater was to be the new pulpit. Hugo, in 1833, wrote that

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ICARUS "the theater is a tribunal. The theater is a pulpit." Drama, he continued, has a mission that embraces the nation, society, all of humanity. He coined the phrase that would remain in his mind for the next fifty years: "The poet also has the cure of souls." Having once declared that the poet must imitate the hero, Hugo now decided to imitate the priest.25 His attempt to explain his change in attitude produced a volume of collected essays, Littérature et philosophie mêlées (1834). Hugo was not above revising his earlier statements, so that his apostasy should seem less extreme. The coherence of his persona was more important than the facts of his life. The new position was the one that Hugo would retain for the rest of his life, an association with the Revolution and, ultimately, with socialism. While he had earlier rallied to the aristocracy, he now associated himself with the people. Béranger spoke for Hugo as well as for himself in writing: "The masses are my Muse." Hugo concerned himself, as did the socialists, with the necessity "of changing the arts from a hieratic to a demotic language." Years later, in the late eighteen-fifties, he would abjure completely his youthful pretensions to nobility, remembering that Burns was a goatherd, Rousseau a lackey, Aesop a slave. He declared himself a plebeian hero — as was Ballanche's Orpheus — and proffered encouragement to the ouvriers-poètes who flourished in the period. As so often, Hugo lost his sense of measure. His concern for the welfare of the people may well have been, as he never tired of saying, pity; it too often produced a weepy socialism that marred his work — as it did in the case of Les Misérables.26 Hugo carried his association with the lower classes even to his final act: in accordance with his will, his coffin was carried on the corbillard des pauvres, the bare carriage used in the funerals of the poor. On the other hand, his involvement with the proletariat did not result in self-effacement. The cart was 74

Victor Hugo part of a state funeral, a huge procession that bore Hugo to enshrinement in the Panthéon.27 The spectacular ceremonies of 1885 lead one back to the no less spectacular pretensions of the eighteen-thirties, for Hugo's model in his association with the cause of the Revolution was Chateaubriand's rival, Napoleon. Hugo's attitude had changed since the days when he referred to the Emperor as "Buonaparte." It had changed as early as 1828, when he wrote "Lui," in which he identified himself as the Memnon of that sun called Napoleon, from whom he derived all his inspiration. What matter whether the source of inspiration be an angel or a devil? he asked, strangely foreshadowing Baudelaire. The important fact was that Napoleon had been a giant. In the eighteen-thirties, Hugo decided that he, too, would be such a giant. The formula for any given century, he wrote, was "a binomial, a + b, the man of action plus the man of thought. One multiplies the other, and they express the value of their times." The Renaissance had Luther and Shakespeare; seventeenth-century England had Cromwell and Milton. The nineteenth century had Napoleon — and Yinconnu. "The physiognomy of this epoch will be determined only when the French Revolution, which personified itself in society in the form of Bonaparte, personifies itself in art. And this will come to pass." Hugo decided that he must reveal himself as the man of the Revolution, in thought and in art.28 The identification of the Romantic movement with the French Revolution did not originate with Hugo. The liberal editors of the Globe made the association before he did. "Literature stands at 'la veille d'un 18 brumaire,' " ended a review published in the Globe in 1825, "but God knows where Bonaparte is! Exoriare aliquis!" "The literary Revolution and the political Revolution fused in me," Hugo wrote, many years later; the juxtaposition of the two concepts was 75

ICARUS a common one for him. As early as 1828, he had associated social liberty and the freedom of the artist.* He was convinced that 1830 was as important a date for poetry as it was for government. The nineteenth century, he often said, had two names: Romanticism and Socialism. The year 1830 marked for Hugo the definitive emergence of both.29 The concept that lay behind these ideas and behind Hugo's new sense of social mission was the nineteenth-century myth of progress. The human race, said Saint-Simon and Ballanche, Fourier, Quinet, and Michelet, must progress, must march unceasingly onward and upward, toward the establishment of a Utopia. This is the myth of which the heroes were the arch-rebels, Prometheus and Satan: they opposed God, said the Romantics and the socialists, but God sanctioned their revolt. Progress, wrote Hugo, is man's function in the world; 30 the vehicle for progress is revolution — "la grande révolte obéissante à Dieu." 3 1 The role of the poet in this process, as Hugo saw it, is to appear at the right moment, to bring the political revolution to fruition and to a peaceful conclusion. This is the lesson of "La Fonction du poëte" (1839). As in earlier poems of the same sort, Hugo speaks first with the voice of the discourager, advising the poet to retire into a solitary contemplation of nature, to avoid the frenetic activity of the mob. He answers in the poet's voice, his own voice: L e poëte en des jours impies Vient préparer des jours meilleurs. Il est l'homme des utopies, Les pieds ici, les yeux ailleurs. C'est lui qui sur toutes les têtes, E n tout temps, pareil aux prophètes, * "Let us hope," Hugo wrote in the preface to the fourth edition of Odes et ballades, "that one day the nineteenth century, political and literary, may be summed up in a word: liberty in the social order, liberty in art."

7*

Victor H u g o Dans sa main, où tout peut tenir, Doit, qu'on l'insulte ou qu'on le loue, Comme une torche qu'il secoue, Faire flamboyer l'avenir! 32

The poet is inspired by God; as Vigny put it, "he reads in the stars the route shown us by the finger of God." He leads the people and the kings to the future. The mission of art is the mission of civilization — "art, on the single condition of remaining faithful to its law, the Beautiful, civilizes men by its own power, even with no intention of doing so, even against its own intention." The poet cannot stand alone; he belongs to the people: Spirits! Be useful! assume some function. Don't turn up your noses when you are called upon to be efficacious and productive. A r t for art's sake may be beautiful, but art for the sake of progress is still more beautiful.* Dreaming daydreams is good, dreaming of Utopia is better . . . The prophet seeks solitude, but not isolation.33

The more he thought of his mission, the further Hugo pushed its boundaries. He envisioned a United States of Europe, a United States of the World, a party that would represent Revolution and Civilization. Béranger, he wrote to a German student who had received the assignment of comparing the two poets, wanted to be a national poet; Hugo wanted to be the Poet of Humanity.34 His desire was the rationale behind La Légende des siècles. * Hugo's theory of art for the sake of progress explains a famous phrase which — abstracted from its context — is invariably misunderstood. Baudelaire sent to Hugo a copy of his article on Théophile Gautier. Hugo wrote back, commenting on the aesthetic theories expressed therein: "I have never said: art for art's sake; I have always said: art for the sake of progress. Basically, they are the same thing . . . W h a t are you doing when you write those striking poems: les Sept Vieillards and les Petites Vieilles, which you dedicated to me and for which I thank you? W h a t are you doing? You are advancing. Y o u are endowing the sky of art with some macabre ray. Vous créez un frisson nouveau" (Correspondance II, 314).

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ICARUS In 1820 Hugo was turning the pages of French history; in 1855 he was witnessing a vision of the history of the world. His little epics were designed to clarify the meaning hidden by God in the rush of human affairs, to point out man's gradual march toward freedom and justice. Progress, in the Légende, appears as a series of revolts against various manifestations of tyranny. The man of the people, Jean Valjean, always triumphs over Javert, the representative of despotism and injustice. Nevertheless, Hugo remained a national poet. The great assertion of human liberty was for him always the French Revolution; it was always on France that he turned his gaze. He tried, in 1848, to enter politics, hoping to become prime minister of the new government established by the younger Bonaparte; the attempt was a failure. The prince-président had never had any intention of giving Hugo such an important position. Hugo — as much through his sons as in his own voice — became a violent critic of the new regime; and, in 1851, when Bonaparte seized absolute power, the poet fled into exile. No one has ever been a more satisfied exile than Hugo. There is no need to invoke the psychoanalytic explanations of Charles Baudouin or Jean Cocteau's sly remark that Hugo had cried out as early as 1832, during the trial provoked by government censorship of Le Roi s'amuse, "Censorship today, exile tomorrow!" The Romantic image of martyrdom became for Hugo political martyrdom. He magnified the personal affront he had received from Napoleon III into an attack on France itself, an attack on the progress of the race. His position gave him the status he had been unable to acquire in France, that of a national figure. He retired into a sort of solitude, but he did not withdraw into isolation.35 From his position on the Channel Islands — and again in 1870, when France faced its next great political crisis —

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Victor H u g o Hugo returned to a function of the poet he had described in Odes et ballades. Since the poet sees and understands the march of human events, he can pronounce the judgment of history: Ah! quelqu'un parlera. La muse, c'est l'histoire. Quelqu'un élèvera la voix dans la nuit noire. Riez, bourreaux bouffons! Quelqu'un te vengera, pauvre France abattue, Ma mere! et l'on verra la parole qui tue Sortir des cieux profonds!38 "Inkwell against cannon. The inkwell will destroy the cannons." 3T Vengeance is the Lord's, since God guides the march of progress and punishes those who try to obstruct it; but His vehicle, His vicar, is the poet. Les Châtiments, Histoire d'un crime, L'Année terrible were written by Victor Hugo; but their judgment — to accept what Hugo said — was the judgment of God. Alone in his exile, Hugo could write: "My life can be summed up in two words: Solitary. Solidary," 38 thereby creating the problem which Camus's unheroic artist, Gilbert Jonas, would be at a loss to resolve. Living meant involvement: "Vivre, c'est être engagé." 39 Hugo's ideas, as the similarity of his statements and those of Sartre and Camus indicates, are alive today. The important difference is that the authors of our century regard the artist's participation in public affairs as his function; Hugo regarded it as his mission as well. He was the vates, the Orphic poet-prophet, speaking with the voice of history, leading humanity into the future, rebuking it when it strayed from the path. And, like any true prophet, he revealed the universal order that makes the social order possible.

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ICARUS — 3 — The two voices he heard on the mountain, wrote Hugo in 1829, were those of humanity and of nature. The Orphic poet belongs to civilization; he belongs to the natural world as well. The book of human history is not the only text he scans. A n association with nature was as much a part of Romanticism as an association with socialist schemes. Hugo himself once defined Romanticism as "a call back to nature," 40 a call to poets to relinquish the pseudo-classic atmosphere of the salon, the pseudo-classic vice of pedantry. Nature assumed for the Romantics a reality it had not possessed for many centuries. The writers of French classicism concentrated their attention on human nature, the manners and motives of men. They, like the poets of the eighteenth century, used natural images merely as decoration. But the eighteenth century witnessed a revival of interest in the natural world and in man's place in relationship to it. For Rousseau, Bernardin de SaintPierre, Chateaubriand, the natural world became more than a painted backdrop; in their writings, they infused landscape with a sense of emotion, a sense of spirituality, and they handed this new attitude on to their successors. The Romantic association of nature and spirit expressed itself in one of two ways. The landscape was, on the one hand, regarded as an extension of the human personality, capable of sympathy with man's emotional state; the pathetic fallacy of Lamartine's elegies is the clearest example of this view. On the other hand, nature was regarded as a vehicle for spirit just as man was: the breath of God fills both man and the earth. This belief, which developed into Romantic pantheism, was the chief result of the association in Hugo's poetry. The Orphic poet, as pre-Romantic theory shaped him, was the man capable of perceiving the spirit of nature, capable of 80

Victor Hugo interpreting nature — since the landscape was regarded as a manifestation of God — to other men. The idea was expressed early in England: Joseph Warton suggested it in "The Enthusiast, or the Lover of Nature," in 1744. Madame de Staël reported the way in which German poets regarded the world and how it differed from the decorative use of nature characteristic of pseudo-classicism: The German poet understands nature not merely as a poet, but as a brother . . . The poet can restore the harmony between the physical world and the world of the mind; his imagination forms a bond between the two.41 But the tradition had been growing in France as well. It lay behind Lamartine's comparison of the poet to the Aeolian harp, which sings at the touch of the wind. It underlay Hugo's belief that the poet is made a poet by learning to love nature: Enivrez-vous de tout! enivrez-vous, poëtes, Des gazons, des ruisseaux, des feuilles inquiètes . . . Mêlez toute votre âme à la création!42 According to Hugo's vision of the poet as an active being, the poet "plays nature" as he would play a musical instrument, gives voice to the voices of the water and the wind. Young and the poets of Sturm-und-Drang said that the creative genius was like a tree; Hugo concurred in this association of the creative process and natural growth.* More than any other French Romantic except, perhaps, Lamartine, he refuted the old dichotomy of art and nature by insisting that they are merely two manifestations of the same power. Just as man is God's vehicle for progress, he is God's vehicle for the creative process. "Nature is God's immediate creation, and art is what God creates through the mind of man." Art • The analogy is still with us: Jean Arp, in On My Way (New York, 1948), even went so far as to compare the creative act to that of giving birth: "Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant or the child in its mother's womb" (p. 93).

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ICARUS is therefore as natural as nature; the poet performs a sacred task and participates in creation. This is not an instance of Promethean activity, since the poet is rather the recipient of divine inspiration than a human rival to God the Creator. It is, however, another indication of Hugo's conviction that his work and his life were blessed by God. 43 But Hugo was not one to regard himself as a passive figure. His Napoleonism, his desire for power, were indications of his essentially active nature, his desire to assert himself and to achieve dominion over others. His attitude toward nature was often marked by the same desire. He was, to borrow Warton's phrase, a lover of nature — and not in a Platonic sense. The relationship between the poet and his Muse was often expressed in sexual terms by the Romantics, by, for example, Musset and Vigny. Hugo, as the Orphic priest of nature, had one Muse, the earth; he was the male, asserting his masculinity and his domination over nature, which he described as a woman. In his old age, he still saw nature as a woman: Je constate en mon âme, Obscure émotion, La grande odeur de femme De la création.44

Like Yeats — and to the horror of Biré — Hugo portrayed himself as a "wild old wicked man." It was his job, he believed, to woo nature, to master it, and to force it to reveal its secrets. He described himself as the companion of the woods and the streams, presented the image of himself in close contact with the natural world. At its worst, this picture of Hugo as the fiancé of nature degenerated into cuteness: as he himself once wrote, he could be Colletet as well as Orpheus.45 At its best, however, it provided Hugo with the inspiration for one of his finest poems, "Le Satyre" (1859). The Satyr, who represents both man as a vehicle for progress to liberty 82

Victor Hugo and the poet as the singer of life, literally possesses the objects of the earth: Si l'eau murmurait: J'aime! il la prenait au mot, Et saisissait l'Ondée en fuite sous les herbes; Ivre de leurs parfums, vautré parmi leurs gerbes, Il faisait une telle orgie avec les lys, Les myrtes, les sorbiers de ses baisers pâlis, Et de telles amours, que, témoin du désordre, Le chardon, ce jaloux, s'efforçait de le mordre . . .46 The mysterious Satyr, it happens, is Pan himself. Hugo, Pan's poet, claims the same power of possessing nature. The image for such possession of which Hugo made most frequent use was not, however, a sexual one. As he had spoken about turning the pages of history, he wrote of nature as a book,47 the reading of which was reserved for the poet.* Je ne lis pas du grec ni du latin; je lis Les horizons brumeux, les soirs doux et pâlis, Le ciel bleu, le lac sombre où l'étoile se mire . . ,48 The earth is not merely matter, a collection of spectacular images — though Hugo displayed an enormous appreciation for the beauties of the world. It is also a collection of symbols, an immense hieroglyph that the true poet, the man truly inspired by God, may read. The distinction between Hugo's theory and Baudelaire's conception of universal correspondences is that nature, for Hugo, retains an importance in itself as a manifestation of God, while for Baudelaire, matter is important only in so far as it is capable of being internalized, "spiritualized." t * The concept of the liber naturae was a familiar one, in both religious and secular writings, in the Middle Ages: the tradition is discussed by Ernst Robert Curtius, in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1953), pp. 319-326. Though he mentions Young, Goethe, Rousseau, et alii, Curtius does not discuss Hugo. t T h i s distinction may account for Baudelaire's having written that "Victor Hugo is a great sculptural poet whose eyes are closed to spirituality" (Œuvres, p. 698).

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ICARUS The book of nature, Hugo thought, was a book written by God. The poet, he believed, translates into human terms the eternal epic of nature. And the book is distinctly a poem, with cadences and harmony; only verse corresponds to the book written by God, only the poet in the limited sense can be the poet, the Orphic interpreter of the earth.* The final word of the book, the reality to which the symbols point, is the Word, God.49 Thus the poet, according to Hugo, was proved to be the true priest. He was inspired by God, and he was capable of discovering God in nature. The priest, on the other hand, was an impostor. The anticlericalism of Hugo's last years was rooted in his political convictions: Hugo could not forgive the French clergy for having celebrated the coronation of Napoleon III and so, he believed, giving their blessing to murder, injustice, and despotism. But his other ideas supported this anticlericalism. The priests, he wrote, all priests, had misread the book of nature.50 Their pretensions to being God's vicars were false claims; they were not really inspired by God. Le ciel, au-dessus d'eux, sur d'éclatants degrés Met les voyants directs, les sages inspirés. Car l'homme fait le prêtre et Dieu seul fait le mage.51

And it was a mage, a priest of light and an interpreter of mystery, that Hugo, as an incarnation of the complete poet, claimed to be. —

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He had written visionary poems when he was in his twenties; they took their place among the Odes, as a Catholic equivalent to the political poems of the young monarchist. Hugo's inspiration came from Lamennais rather than from * " H e for whom verse is not a natural language may be a poet; he is not the poet . . . For, when one looks at the creation, a sort of mysterious music appears under this splendid geometry; nature is a symphony; everything in it is cadence and measure; and one might almost say that G o d created the world in verse" (Océan, Tas de pierres, p. 470).

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Victor Hugo God; but the poet, like the priest, claimed to hear God's voice accusing the impiety of the dying age.52 It was not until 1829 that Hugo discovered the expression he was to use throughout the rest of his life. In "Parfois, lorsque tout dort," he said that he felt himself chosen by God and that he alone was predestined to understand the signs God had placed in the heavens, the stars. This use of light symbolism was probably the source for his later choice of the word "mage" * and for the image of himself that Hugo developed during and after his exile. The voice Hugo heard in his quality of mage was that of the "bouche d'ombre," the voice of universal mysteries, explaining to him what lay beyond the material world. His third vision was that of the stars: his mission as Orphic revealer of mysteries was to read what God had written in them. The revelations Hugo had to make may easily be considered absurd. He elaborated a cosmogony which owes something to Christian gnosticism, something to the religions of the East, and a great deal to Hugo's own fertile imagination. But if Hugo was a fool, then so was Yeats: like Hugo, Yeats claimed to reveal the true mysteries of the universe; like Hugo, he believed that supernatural agents had confirmed his vision of the world. The tables tournantes on the island of Guernesey were worth as much, or as little, as the automatic writing of Geòrgie Hyde-Lees Yeats. In one way, however, such cosmogonies were immensely useful: they provided both Hugo and Yeats with new mythologies on which to construct their poems. Hugo's dogmatic revelations were as much lunatic statements as was "The Phases of the Moon." But the poems for which the mythology served as substructure rather than as substance — some of Les Contemplations, the three epics, some later poems — are among Hugo's greatest. * Hugo's first use of the word, if I am not mistaken, occurred in the poem "Sagesse" (1837-1840), the closing piece to Les Rayons et les ombres: Et tu ne comprends pas que ton destin, à toi, C'est de penser! c'est d'etre un mage et d'etre un roi . . .

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ICARUS His new cosmogony in mind, Hugo was able to reveal himself as the highest incarnation of the Orphic ideal. If he was not, as he said the poet was, "un homme qui voit Dieu," 63 he could still pose as the man who understood some of God's mysteries and pointed the way to God. Hugo's final definition of himself grew out of all his earlier statements. He had posed first as the poet reading human history and discovering in it the progress of the race toward liberty, the fact that revolution is sanctioned by God, the fact that man is God's instrument of progress on earth. He had then strained to hear the song of nature, read the book of nature, possessed nature sexually, and discovered that he could make the natural world reveal its secrets. Nature, Hugo discovered, is not only Eve. It is Isis, whose veils must be removed, and Lilith, who conceals sinister mysteries. Being the lover of the flowers and the streams was not enough for Hugo: Je suis l'amant mystérieux De l'âme obscure qui soupire Au fond des bois, au fond des cieux! 54 Even the mysterious forces of the universe took on the shape of a woman in Hugo's mind. He was, he wrote, "le fiancé de l'ombre et de l'aube l'amant." 55 This intermingling of matter and spirit was characteristic of Hugo. His cosmogony was based on it because it seems to have been one of the chief concerns of his thought. He identified the process of philosophy with the workings of the imagination and wrote that only through the real could one reach the ideal: . . . je m'enivre De l'idéal dans le réel; La fleur, c'est l'âme; et je sens vivre A travers la terre, le ciel.88

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Victor Hugo Only after having loaded himself with humanity could the poet trust himself in the sea of divine inspiration. One of Hugo's heroes was, after all, the Satyr, who combined animal spirits and human intelligence and who assured the triumph of the spirit by celebrating the life of the earth. Hugo's cosmogony thus grew from his early pantheistic conceptions. As he explained in the visionary poems of the eighteen-fifties, the life of the universe is a process in which living beings try to escape from matter and darkness and to reach the spirit and light which are God. The world as we know it is the world after the Fall — and the Fall is not that of Adam and Eve, but that of Satan. Lucifer's fall engenders matter; this negative creation is symbolized in La Fin de Satan by the extinction of the sun. But matter is still the vehicle for spirit, as Satan is still the recipient of God's love. It is up to the material universe to desire a return to the state of spirit; in La Fin de Satan, Satan is saved when he admits that he loves God. All material creation is involved in the process, from the stones to the plants, from the animals to man. Man contains an equal amount of matter and spirit; he may incline in either direction. If he is unjust and evil, he leans downward; if he is good and just, if he experiences love and pity, he brings himself closer to God. On man's decision hangs the fate of the entire universe: L'œuvre du genre humain, c'est de délivrer l'âme; C'est de la dégager du triste épithalame Que lui chante le corps impur; C'est de la rendre, chaste, à la clarté première; Car Dieu rêveur a fait l'âme pour la lumière Comme il fit l'aile pour l'azur.57

It should be clear that Hugo's myth of a universal striving after light and spirit was essentially an extension of the nineteenth-century myth of progress. Liberty, the goal toward which human history is moving, said Hugo, is not merely a

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ICARUS political reality; it is a spiritual state. Political despotism finds its spiritual counterpart in the concept of fatality: the stone must remain a stone. Both are symbolized as matter, as shadow, in Hugo's visionary poems. What distinguishes Hugo's mysticism from orthodox Christian thought is his conviction that only in terms of matter may the striving toward spirit be realized. Hugo regarded as unnatural the denial of the flesh, of human affection and of participation in life: Sans quitter le réel, conquérons l'idéal; Restons homme, en montant vers le sépulcre austère. Il faut aller au ciel en marchant sur la terre.58 This may be nothing more, as Guillemin's studies seem to suggest, than Hugo's recognition that, in middle age, he still possessed a sexual impulse greater than that of most men — and again the analogy with Yeats is relevant. Whatever its source may have been, this conviction provided Hugo with a justification for his desire to participate in political activity. It also allowed him to place the French Revolution on the same plane as the Crucifixion: both were steps in man's spiritual progression. The French Revolution stands at the end of Hugo's career as it stood at the beginning, as the symbol for human progress, the march to God as well as to socialism. The political leader and the religious leader, as the Saint-Simonians had taught, were one. That one was the mage — poet, philosopher, priest, and politician. Tenseur was the word Hugo often used; and, he explained, penseur is an active noun. The poet-mage, according to Hugo, pursued the universal mysteries as the poet pursued nature. He had first to anchor himself in human knowledge, then to plunge into the contemplation of the irrational and the mysterious: "The chemist is brother to the alchemist. The astronomer is brother to the astrologer. W e don't think

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Victor Hugo this lessens their value. The striving for the ideal has more than once led to the conquest of reality." The rule for the mage is always to "go beyond" — "aller au-delà." To understand man, he has to understand nature; to understand man and nature, he must contemplate infinity. This is, said Hugo, the "supreme contemplation."59 The means for the contemplation of infinity, of universal mystery, is intuition, "the immense internal eye." And, as Hugo says in a remarkable text, Promontorium Somnii, it is dream. The prototype of the poet-mage is Jacob, "the sleeper who keeps open the eyes of his soul." At the top of the ladder is the ideal, which only the spiritual eye may perceive. The danger of such dreaming is that it may lead to madness. The mage must keep a firm hold on reality.60 The self-definition that was Hugo's most characteristic method appears in poem after poem in which he presents himself as the mage, "l'homme farouche / Ivre d'ombre et d'immensité."61 He writes: J e suis l'auditeur solitaire, E t j'écoute en moi, hors de moi, L e J e ne sais qui du mystère Murmurant le Je ne sais quoi.

And: J e suis l'être incliné qui jette ce qu'il pense; Qui demande à la nuit le secret du silence; Dont la brume emplit l'œil . . .

And: Moi qu'on nomme le poëte, J e suis dans la nuit muette L'escalier mystérieux; J e suis l'escalier Ténèbres; Dans mes spirales funèbres L'ombre ouvre ses vagues yeux. 62

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ICARUS At times, the device seems not to lead to Hugo himself: "Écoutez. Je suis Jean. J'ai vu des choses sombres." 83 But Saint John at Patmos is Hugo on his isle. The reviewer who said that Hugo's William Shakespeare should have been called Moi was quite correct. When, in that strange work, Hugo described the first performance of Aeschylus's Prometheus, he was obviously thinking of the opening night of Hernani. When he included in his list of the fourteen great geniuses of humanity the epic poet Homer, the satirist Juvenal, Tacitus, who recorded the crimes of the Caesars, Dante, who created an image of the abyss — he was thinking of La Légende des siècles, of Les Châtiments, of Histoire d'un crime, of La Fin de Satan. Even when he described Shakespeare, he was thinking of himself: after Homer closed the ancient gate of barbarism, Shakespeare closed the Gothic gate of the Middle Ages. The French Revolution closed the monarchist gate; and the French Revolution in human form — Hugo had written it thirty years earlier—was Victor Hugo. All of Hugo's later works answered the question, "What manner of man art thou?" The answer was couched in terms of action as well as of essence. "Ibo," wrote Hugo — Je suis celui que rien n'arrête, Celui qui va, Celui dont l'âme est toujours prête A Jéhovah; Je suis le poëte farouche, L'homme devoir, Le souffle des douleurs, la bouche Du clairon noir . . . J'irai lire la grande bible; J'entrerai nu Jusqu'au tabernacle terrible De l'inconnu.64

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Victor Hugo His greatest pretension was the fulfillment of the Orphic mission, the revelation of God to man. It is a tribute to what memory of modesty Hugo may have had that he felt this ultimate revelation was not possible for any living being. The last words of Dieu, the action necessary for the contemplation of truth, are: "Et je mourus." But this final pose was the justification for all of Hugo's later work. He felt capable of rendering political, moral, and religious judgments because he believed that he had gone as far as man may go. He was Hugo, "Ce vieux de la montagne et de la poésie,"66 and he had to explain himself to the world. — 5— Sainte-Beuve, whose judgments are not always to be trusted, was not wrong when, in his private notebooks, he referred to Hugo as Polyphemus, as Cyclops, as Caliban; when he wrote that Hugo's powers were puerile and titanic at the same time. Baudelaire as well noticed that Hugo moved in the realm of the excessive and the immense as if it were his natural atmosphere. They were right because they recognized what Hugo had wanted his readers to recognize: the image of a man who was a giant.88 The poet who pretends to fulfill an Orphic mission must be as large as that mission. Any true poet, wrote Hugo in 1840, must contain "the sum of the ideas of his times." This is why, as he grew out of the Catholic-monarchist faith of his youth, he came to admire Voltaire. Voltaire for Hugo was the eighteenth century — "a great representative of everything." This is why Hugo envied Napoleon, the titan who stood on the threshold of the nineteenth century, and Aeschylus, and Rabelais, and Shakespeare. It was also the reason for which he compared the poet to a volcano, to a rushing river, and to the ocean itself. The poet who wants to tame nature must be as

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ICARUS wild as the forest, as raging as the sea. Genius, Hugo believed, must be prodigious.67 "Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo" — Cocteau's famous quip is rather a favorable appreciation of the force of Hugo's persona than an adverse reflection on his sanity. As such, it accords with what was probably the most accurate nineteenth-century judgment of Hugo. In Hugo's presence, wrote Leconte de Lisle, one was in the presence of "a powerful will congruous with a destiny, which is the mark of the genius." Hugo's pretension to being divinely inspired, to fulfilling the triple Orphic mission in which the poet possesses the personality capable of reflecting the universe and of revealing its secrets, led him to describe himself as a titan, composed of an enormous will, an enormous appetite for power, an enormous imagination. When he defined himself, when he said: Ego Hugo, this is what he meant.68

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Chapter

III

Honore de Balzac: The Poet as Demiurge Balzac playfully described himself, in a letter to Madame Hanska written in 1834, as "the engraver, the smelter, the sculptor, the goldsmith, the convict, the artist, the thinker, the poet, the what you 'will"1 This progression from the artisan to the poet — and beyond that to the mysterious "what you will" — is a remarkable, though surely unintentional, key to Balzac's image of the ideal artist. It was one of the common Greek words for artisan or handicraftsman — demiourgos, a "public worker" — that neo-Platonic philosophy appropriated and applied to the shaping spirit, the world-creator, the Demiurge. The true poet, as Balzac thought of him, was a demiurge, a man who shaped or changed and so ruled the world: It is true of Gutenberg, of Columbus, of Schwartz, of Descartes, of Raphael, of Voltaire, of David. All were artists, for they created; they used the power of thought to make human ability produce something new, some new combination of the elements of nature, physical or spiritual.2

The inclusion, in this list, of philosophers, scientists, discoverers, as well as of artists in the limited sense, was characteristic of Balzac. Poetry, as he conceived it, was not merely the 93

ICARUS art of literature: it was creation, assembling or reassembling of ideas and objects, in thought or in action.3 One of his heroes was indeed the painter Raphael, whose name occurs in almost every novel Balzac wrote. But another was Cuvier: Isn't Cuvier the greatest poet of our century? Of course, Lord Byron did reproduce a few mental disturbances in words; but our immortal naturalist reconstructed worlds from bleached bones, like Cadmus he rebuilt cities from teeth, repopulated a thousand forests with all the mysteries of zoology from a few bits of coal, rediscovered races of giants in the footprint of a mammoth.4 Such re-creation of a world, whether by a scientist or a poet, was the supreme action for Balzac. It was, of course, the action to which he devoted his life. "As for me, I shall have carried a whole society in my head!" 5 he wrote to Madame Hanska in 1844. As the rival of the civil register, he equated himself with Napoleon, Cuvier, and O'Connell, three other men who lived the life of a people or of a world. He wrote proudly of a visit to a medium who had drawn back from him in terror, crying, "What is this head? It is a world, it frightens me!" 6 The demiurgic poet, according to Balzac, must also be a creative thinker. In his youth, Balzac had wanted to be a philosopher, and he never really relinquished the desire. He planned to complete the Comédie humaine with a philosophical study which would explain the various series of scènes: having dramatized what were in reality the effects of a number of laws, Balzac would explain the causes of these effects, the forces behind the events of human life.7 He did not live to realize his plans; but the Études philosophiques, the Études analytiques and the Avant-propos to the Comédie humaine suggest something of what Balzac intended. He thought of himself not merely as an historian — Walter Scott had been that before him, had refined the observation of society and the recording of that observation. Balzac wanted to be "Wal-

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Honoré de Balzac ter Scott plus an architect," as his interpreter Félix Davin wrote in 1835, in an introduction to the Études de mœurs au XIXe siècle, Balzac's first attempt to produce a synthetic picture of French society — a synthesis for which the Études philosophiques, published concurrently, would provide an analysis. The creator who knows the rules of his creation, the causes that produce the effects, is, of course, a scientist. Walter Scott, Balzac wrote in the Avant-propos of 1842, was a trouveur as well as a trouvère, an inventor and a poet. The "two poets" of Illusions perdues are Lucien de Rubempré, sonneteer and novelist, and David Séchard, chemist and inventor. Since both possess many of the qualities of the true artist, they aid each other by suggesting ideas and fields for study; Lucien is as much a scientist as is David, David as true a poet as Lucien. Scientists — Cuvier, Gall, Lavater, Mesmer — were poets for Balzac not only because they created, but because they sought out the laws of life. The search for the absolute — for truth, for the laws of human and geological developments, for the basic material elements — occurs many times in the Comédie humaine. Balzac regarded Mesmer with no less respect than he regarded Cuvier; he considered alchemy no less respectable a search for the absolute than chemistry or political science. He always intended to write a novel based on the life of Bernard Palissy, chemist, alchemist, inventor, philosopher, and, as Balzac understood the word, poet.8 Pure poetry and pure science, the lesson of Part pour Part, could not content Balzac. His thought revealed — as did the realism of his novels — a constant appeal from theory to practice, from art to action, from fiction to reality. The true poet, Balzac believed, was not necessarily the maker of an imitation of life: he was a creator of life itself, one who could translate his thoughts into action. "Napoleon is as great a poet as Homer; he wrote poetry just as Homer waged battles." The

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ICARUS greatest poet or artist in the Comedie humaine is not Joseph Bridau nor Daniel d'Arthez nor even David Séchard; it is the Promethean and Satanic Jacques Collin. Vautrin is the most admirable creator in Balzac's world because he creates in terms of reality itself, not through a collection of symbols. "I am a great poet," he informs Rastignac. "I don't write my poems: they consist of actions and feelings." Lucien de Rubempré may be a fallen Icarus. Vautrin is Daedalus, the old artificer: his greatest creation is Lucien de Rubempré himself. Lucien in Vautrin's power no longer has a personality of his own. He is a creation, a work of art, moulded by the strongest personality in all of Romantic fiction.9 As a creator and shaper of human beings, Vautrin — like the Gnostic demiurge and like Prometheus — usurps the function of God: he takes over the role of Providence, he replaces destiny.10 In other words, he dramatizes Balzac's position as novelist. Balzac was — as Sartre said of Mauriac — the God of his own universe. One of his most characteristic devices was the creation of a sense of destiny, or necessity, in the actions of his novels. Balzac announced what was about to happen and then proved it to the reader by making it happen: the actions could not possibly have occurred in any other way. The appeal from art to action, the translation of Balzac's activities as a novelist into Vautrin's shaping of men, was Balzac's version of the Romantic conviction that the artist must be the leader of society. Addressing himself to the French writers of the nineteenth century in 1834, he wrote: "We are the new pontiffs of a mysterious future, which we ourselves are preparing."11 He was convinced that he would win the power he desired, that he would indeed accomplish with the pen what Napoleon had begun with the sword — the reorganization of French society. The Comedie hummne was, after all, a collection of lessons, a demonstration of the necessity of upholding traditional institutions like the family, the 96

Honoré de Balzac throne, and the altar. Balzac's own gift, that of observing and recording the history of humanity, was the means by which he thought to accomplish his goals. The poet, he wrote in 1843, is "a man invested with a magnificent ministry" — like Hugo, Balzac possessed a sense of mission; the poet "reigns over humanity when he has succeeded in portraying it." 12 Behind these ideas and aims lay one of Balzac's strangest theories, which he probably elaborated on the basis of his own reading and his conversations with Dr. Koreff. He attributed the theory to Raphaël de Valentin, Louis Lambert, and le docteur Physidor, one of the interlocutors of Les Martyrs ignorés, an unfinished philosophical study. According to these mouthpieces, thought is a fluid which may be concentrated and directed, by means of which an individual may impress his own personality and his own desires on the personalities and lives of other men. The concentrated force which directs thought and which is the central element of the strong personality of genius is the will. Balzac's world was a world of Will and Idea, a world in which the creative genius, the true poet, could mould humanity to fit his idea by the exercise of his own titanic will.* It was thus that Vautrin could shape the destiny of Lucien de Rubempré, that Napoleon could direct the march of the nineteenth century, and that Balzac — in the absence of the opportunity to fulfill the mission of the poet, as it was seen by Romanticism — could shape the lives and personalities of his characters.13 Among the classical myths popular with the Romantics, the one which most closely approaches Balzac's notion of the poet as demiurge is the myth of Prometheus. The artistic genius, according to Balzac's eccentric Maître Frenhofer, carries * Pierre-Georges Castex (in Le Conte fantastique en France de Nodier à Maupassant, Paris, 1951, p. 174) suggests that Balzac found his concepts dramatized in Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein and Mathurin's Melmoth the Wanderer, which thus became important sources for the Études philosophiques.

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"Prometheus's torch"; it is with this heavenly flame, this gift of life, that the artist must infuse his works. Ordinarily, the Romantics interpreted the tale of Prometheus as a myth of revolt. As such, it fused with the story of Satan to form an archetypal pattern of titanic self-assertion, revolt against a tyrant, and discovery of knowledge. In French Romanticism, Satan stood as the model for the hero of action, the fatal outlaw — as he was incarnated by Charles Nodier in Jean Sbogar, by the elder Dumas in Antony. The name of Prometheus was linked with that myth of human progress which runs through much of Romanticism: Edgar Quinet, for example, allegorized the history of the development of man's religious consciousness in his Promethee-, and Hugo, in Dieu, recounted the liberation of man from religious and political tyranny in terms of the same story — though the liberator was not Hercules, but Hugo's own Orpheus.16 Balzac rejected the doctrine of social progress, which he considered a tenet of materialism: "I do not share the belief in unlimited progress, as far as societies go." But Hugo's conviction that Balzac, "although he did not know it, whether or not he willed it, whether or not he consented to it . . . belonged to the strong race of revolutionary writers," was not completely false. Like Milton, Balzac was of the Devil's party. The demiurge of the Gnostics, like the earth-shaper of the Manicheans, introduced evil into the world. The poetry of action, in the person of Vautrin, becomes the poetry of evil.* Vautrin reminds us that such self-assertion as that of Prometheus incurs the wrath of God; and that it was Prometheus who provided an archetype for one of the two basic impulses of Romanticism, the drive to assert one's self, to impose one's personality on the world. Evil though he may be to the eye of * Balzac often associated art and evil, and the Cerizet of Les Petits Bourgeois even becomes "an artist in Evil" (CH, VII, 127). One might compare De Quincey's essays, "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts," and Oscar Wilde's "Pen, Pencil and Poison."

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Honoré de Balzac God, Vautrin is a hero in the eyes of Balzac. "I believe in man's ability to progress beyond his present condition," Balzac proclaimed — and such spiritual progress must be understood in terms of Romantic titanism as well as of Christianity. "Having no other support than my self, I have been forced to enlarge, to strengthen my self," he wrote to Madame Hanska. He might have cried out with Goethe's Prometheus, as he surveyed his accomplishments: Hast du nicht ailes selbst vollendet, Heilig gliihend Herz? For Balzac's personal experience stood behind his theories. As did the other Romantics, he found his image of the artist realized in his own accomplishments and his own aspirations.16

Balzac's goals were with him from his youth. Of him more than of anyone are Freud's comments about the artist true. In a discussion of art as a return to reality as well as an escape into imagination, Freud said of the artist that "he is impelled by too powerful instinctive needs. He wants to achieve honor, power, riches, fame, and the love of women." Balzac may never have given his goals the concise expression one finds in the Correspondance of 1876 — "to be famous and to be loved"; the phrase is, nevertheless, a true one. The letters he wrote to his family during his first years of independence in Paris were masterpieces of self-confidence. Balzac, it seems, never doubted that he would accomplish what he had set out to do. Even after incurring the debts that would be with him for the rest of his life, he could write to his mother, in 1832: "Sooner or later literature, politics, journalism, a marriage or my great venture will bring me a fortune." His prefaces to the various editions of his novels were written in the same spirit of self-confidence. Balzac was enormously aware of the

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ICARUS originality of his undertaking, never tired of calling that originality and the immensity of his literary schemes to the attention of the public.17 His dreams when he was young were no different from those of his maturity; the difference lay rather in the means by which he hoped to realize his dreams — means which found their reflection in his vision of the ideal artist. The difference may be perceived not so much in Balzac's supermen, since Vautrin retains the more than human powers of Falthurne and of the mysterious Beringheld; it is clearly revealed in the gallery of attractive and ambitious young men who are so often the heroes of Balzac's novels. Balzac's conception of human perfection appeared for the first time in an epistolary novel written in 1819 and 1820, Sténie, ou les erreurs philosophiques. The hero of the novel, Jacob Del Ryès, incarnated a type which was to remain an object of admiration for Balzac. Del Ryès is a hero in the manner of Madame de Staël, a complete enthusiast. Like the other characters in the novel, he dabbles in rationalism and scepticism, the "philosophical errors" of the title; but he is more a man of poetry than of reason and takes great pleasure in the Icarian flights of imagination which carry him "into I know not what fantastic region, beyond all the frontiers of common reason." He is more than a dreamer, since he translates his imaginings into poetry, painting, and music; we are led to believe that he is a master in all the arts. On the other hand, Del Ryès exhibits none of the one-sidedness characteristic of many of the artists in La Comédie humaine. His artistic genius in no way stifles the genius of his heart: he loves — as his beloved Sténie points out — because he is exalted. In addition, Del Ryès possesses occult powers, which manifest themselves as prophetic dreams and flashes of intuitive knowledge. Finally, he is very handsome and very rich. That Del Ryès is little more than the concretization of a wish-dream

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Honoré de Balzac should be obvious. He is a Prince Charming who unites a perfect worldly situation—wealth and success in love—with a perfect character, a balanced blend of genius and sensibility.18 Such fairy-tale heroes reappear throughout Balzac's works. In Wann-Chlore (1825) there is Horace, Duke of LandonTaxis. His powers are less magical than those of Del Ryès; but he is just as wealthy, handsome, sensitive, brave, and enthusiastic. As late as 1839, Balzac was still fascinated by the "young man in all his glory, displaying at one and the same time beauty, nobility, and pure feelings." He thus described Calyste du Guénic; he might have been speaking as well of Ernest de La Brière, the Prince Charming of Modeste Mignon. But there is an important difference between Calyste and Ernest and the remarkable Del Ryès: the two perfect young lovers of the Comédie humaine are not artists. In fact, Balzac contrasts them with artists: Calyste finds rivals in the tenor Gennaro Conti and the critic Claude Vignon, Ernest in the poet Canalis. The moral of both Béatrix and Modeste Mignon is that the artist is not the man of pure sentiment; he is rather egoistic and cold. The "disproportion between talent and life" illustrated in Goethe's Torquato Tasso appears in Balzac's novels as an opposition of genius and sensibility: "Every writer bears in his heart a monster like the tapeworm in the stomach, which devours feelings as soon as they sprout." Balzac had made the point early in his career, in a short novel entitled Gloire et malheur, which was to become La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote. The hero of the story, Théodore de Sommervieux, has all the charms of Del Ryès: nobility, beauty, genius. But he lacks pure sentiments; he is an egoist, he is fickle, and it is through his neglect and cruelty that the unfortunate Augustine Guillaume meets her death.19 This discovery that the perfect young artist might be unable to love — a discovery which he never forgot and which 1o1

ICARUS is revealed in novel after novel — was not the only development, nor the most important development, in Balzac's vision of the artist. The perfect young men of the Comédie humaine — and to those already mentioned one might add the painter Hippolyte Schinner — appear in the Scènes de la vie privée, which, even when they become darkest, retain a certain air of innocence and purity. Such heroes would be almost unthinkable in the later series of scènes. What Balzac did in his novels was to subject his early ideal type to the experience of the harsh reality of the Scènes de la vie parisienne. The same experience is the one Balzac himself lived through. The prerequisite for such a hero as Del Ryès is wealth: he must be free to devote himself to art and to sentiment, without the worries engendered by debts and deadlines and contracts. Balzac's own experience, and the experience to which he submitted his heroes, was that of poverty, of struggling to make a living. No one who has read the letters Balzac wrote to Madame Hanska can forget the position held in his life by money. On one occasion he wrote, "Money worries are becoming for me what the Furies were for Orestes."20 The aim of his last years, as his later letters amply demonstrate, was to be solvent and to be loved. He barely achieved either. Yet the way in which he hoped to achieve his goal was through continual production. Where could he find the money he needed? he wrote to Madame Hanska in 1843; and he answered his own question: "In my writing desk! . . . work is the artist's cashbox." 21 Work, a rage of work which required Balzacian intensity, became for Balzac the right as well as the necessary way to live. The world of the Comédie humaine is composed of two great classes which are, to borrow terms from an anecdote Balzac published in 1830, idlers and workers [oisifs and travailleurs]. Balzac may have envied the oisifs, the dandies, the descendants of Del Ryès; but he admired the travailleurs, those

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Honoré de Balzac who were as busy as he was. His descriptions of himself, throughout the eighteen-thirties and 'forties, revolved about the amount of work he had to do. "That is my life. Work, and more work!" He compared himself to Sisyphus and to Hercules, called himself the Wandering Jew of thought, "always afoot, forever on the move, with no rest, with no emotional satisfactions . . ." What kept him going, he felt, was the enormous will through which he hoped to achieve the power he desired. He wrote proudly to Madame Hanska that a friend had told him that "Napoleon had not displayed as much will, nor as much courage." His only pleasures, he wrote, were the ecstasies of work itself and the poems of hope.22 The effect on his novels was twofold. In the first place, Balzac created what became almost an archetypal situation in his fictional world: the life of study, the life of work. It is usually some variant of the alchemist's quest, the search for the absolute. The hero is the man who devotes himself to study and to the elaboration of a single idea or a single system, in any area. He may be a true alchemist, like Balthazar Claës; or a theorist in some field, like Xavier Rabourdin, Z. Marcas, Louis Lambert, Daniel d'Arthez, Raphaël de Valentin; a scientist, like David Séchard; or an artist, like François Poussin, Hippolyte Schinner, Joseph Bridau. The model for the life of study was probably the career of Bernard Palissy. Palissy, like Balzac himself, knew years of study, of experimentation, and of failure before he arrived at some sort of success.23 Related to this life of study is another "archetypal situation," the test. The Prince Charming of Balzac's youthful fiction is forced to prove himself. Del Ryès exists in the vacuum of his own perfection. In the Comédie humaine, the young man of genius is brought into the crowded life of Paris. He cannot prove himself merely by being what he is; he must overcome the temptations of the city and demonstrate his genius, assert himself and impose his personality on the world 103

ICARUS around him. The test, as an element in Balzac's novels, may of course be combined with the life of study. Raphaël de Valentin moves from the latter to the former; Daniel d'Arthez is engaged in both simultaneously. The setting for the life of study, the search for the absolute, is almost always a laboratory or a retreat, somewhere outside of Paris or in the past. The test occurs in the market-place, the public and commercial center of Paris. Much of Balzac's concern with the artist is directed toward an attempt to reconcile the two, to superimpose one sphere of activity on the other and to see what happens. The ideal artist or poet is the man who elaborates his idea in the silence of his retreat and imposes it on the world, "passes the test" in the market place. This was, Balzac believed, what Napoleon and Cuvier and Palissy had done; it was what Balzac himself wanted so desperately to do.

The novel into which Balzac directed all these streams of ideas was the "monster volume" (as Princess Belgiojoso called it), "the chief work in the work" (as the novelist himself called it), Illusions perdues. If one adds to it the novels to which it is related by the retour des personnages—Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, Une Fille d'Eve, La Muse du département, Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan — one finds a clear elaboration of the various archetypal patterns and basic concerns of Balzac: the life of study, the question of work and will, the test in the market place. T o read Illusions perdues as Lukâcs did, as the dramatization of "the capitalist debasement and prostitution of literature itself," and as nothing more, is to overlook the fact that many of Balzac's ideas were adaptations of common Romantic beliefs, that the situations of Illusions perdues are paralleled by actions of other novels by Balzac, novels which have nothing to do with capitalism as

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H o n o r é de Balzac such. Lukács says, for example, that Balzac "created" the character of Lucien de Rubempré — "a new, specifically bourgeois type of poet: the poet as an Aeolian harp sounding to the veering winds and tempests of society, the poet as a rootless, aimlessly drifting, oversensitive bundle of nerves . . ." Nothing could be farther from the truth. As a poet, Lucien recalls one of the ideal types of the eighteen-twenties — "those sensitive and sickly souls . . . those febrile and suffering creatures whom we may generally include in the category of artists" * — which Sainte-Beuve had described in the life of Joseph Delorme, which Lamartine and the poètes poitrinaires had incarnated, which Sénancour, as early as 1804, had painted in Obermann. T h e poet as Aeolian harp, as bird of passage, was anything but a bourgeois type; he belonged rather to the aristocratic ideas of pre-Romanticism. 24 But Lucien is more than this. He is a new incarnation of the original Balzacian hero, the perfect young man. Like Del Ryès, he is very handsome, very talented, and very sensitive. H e is, as the less gifted but more successful Canalis says of him, a Phoenix. 23 Y e t Lucien lacks wealth, the prerequisite for the perfect young man; and he is not a member of the aristocracy — his name is actually Lucien Chardon. T h e Romantic beliefs of Balzac's youth are tested, through Lucien's adventures, against the standards of reality: the illusions that flourish in the provinces are destroyed b y the grim necessities of Parisian life. Those parts of Illusions perdues that deal with Lucien are the story of a test, a trial under which the poet from Angoulême fails to stand up. For Lucien is only superficially admirable. H e is basically "a little joker," vain, ambitious, egocentric. Balzac never gives the reader a chance to believe anything else. Even in the * Sainte-Beuve's phrase deserves to be quoted in the original: "ces âmes sensibles et maladives . . . ces natures fébriles et souffrantes, qui peuvent en général se comprendre sous le nom d'artistes."

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ICARUS opening pages of the novel, he reveals the less admirable sides of Lucien's character, his lack of moral fibre, his desire for success at any cost, the feminine graces that are a sign of the weakness of his character. As d'Arthez writes to Ève, Lucien's sister, "Lucien is a poetic soul and not a poet, he dreams and does not think, he fidgets and does not create. In sum . . . he is a womanish weakling who likes to show off . . . " In other words, Lucien lacks the titanic will that Balzac considered the essential component of creative genius. He is unable to collect what force he has, to concentrate it for any length of time on a single point, and to produce anything but the fragments of a true work of art. In Paris, he falls prey to all the temptations of society: his one ambition is success as the world defines it — wealth and a brilliant reputation, power in society. He is no more able to realize this dream than to create a work of art. As he later learns from the abbé Carlos Herrera — Vautrin in the guise of a Spanish priest — the example he has been following, that of Napoleon, misleads anyone who lacks will, who lacks the ability to bring society to his feet. As Lucien leaves Angoulême for Paris, he asks, rhetorically, "Do I not have a destiny to fulfill?" He does indeed; but it is the destiny of Balzac's "incomplete geniuses, who have some ability to desire, to conceive . . . but who are powerless to produce." 26 Lucien fails the test in Paris, fails to assert himself because he makes the wrong choice. Of the two ways open to him, he chooses the one that seems simplest and quickest: he avoids the life of study and single-minded devotion represented by the cénacle de la rue des Quatre-Vents and plunges into the brilliant and corrupt world of journalism. Balzac's description of journalism, "the great affliction of this century," makes the world of the newspaper one of the deepest circles in the inferno of the Comédie humaine * * The brothers Goncourt adapted their descriptions of the world of

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Honoré de Balzac

Journalism, he proclaimed in the preface to Un Grand Homme de province d Paris, kills youth and talent, buries its crimes under the profoundest secrets. In the novel itself, the editorial offices of Parisian periodicals are explicitly compared to Hell: "Journalism is an inferno, an abyss of iniquities, lies, betrayals, which one cannot cross and from which one cannot return pure, unless protected like Dante by the divine laurel of Virgil." The journalist's life, when he is not at his office, is a round of orgies, of experiences which waste and destroy what talent a man may have. Lucien, unprotected, succumbs to the temptations of this apparently brilliant existence; he prostitutes himself by selling his talent and his time to the self-interested editors who lay traps for unsuspecting novices. The association of prostitution and journalism is another frequent image in Illusions perdues. Newspaper offices are "bordellos of thought"; journalists and courtesans lead their lives of corruption in common. When the idea is brought into the market place, Balzac asserted, it is likely to be sullied and destroyed.27 The elaborate structure of illusions and hopes that Lucien has built up finally collapses upon him: having failed the test in Paris, he returns to Angouléme, where he succeeds only in bringing disaster to his family. He considers suicide but is saved at the last minute by Vautrin, who exercises his Satanic charm on the weak-willed poet.* Lucien literally sells himself to the devil by signing a pact with Vautrin. In doing so, journalism, in Charles Demailly (i860) and Manette Salomon (1867), from Balzac's portrayal of it. T h e other side of the coin, Balzac's description of the cénacle, served as a model for Murger's Les Buveurs d'eau (1855). W i l d e was right: Balzac invented the nineteenth century. * While V i g n y was calling for pity for the dying poet, Balzac dismissed suicide as a sign of weakness, a lack of staying power; he developed his views to some degree in Illusions perdues. H e had already expressed the same opinion in a review of Custine's Le Monde comrne il est (1835) ( O D , II, 677-679) and l'abbé Guillon's Entretiens sur le suicide (1836) (OD, III, i - j ) . I might take this occasion also to offer a suggestion concerning the I O 7

ICARUS he loses his nature as a creator: instead of forging his own destiny, he puts his fate in the hands of someone else. When he reappears in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, Lucien is not the creator but the creation, a work of art. Balzac continues to refer to him as "le poète," but the true poet is Vautrin himself. The sexual nature of their relationship is more than implied. Lucien is clearly a woman — "une femme manquée" Vautrin calls him after his death — and, as a woman, he can be shaped and mastered by a man. Vautrin, the super-artist, is strong-willed and masculine. Although Balzac never really made the point too clear, he seems to have believed that only a man could be a true poet, could impose himself on the world and could create. "Prometheus's torch" was for him the symbol of an assertion of masculinity.* If Lucien has hips rounded like those of a woman, Camille Maupin, Balzac's lady novelist, has a slim, masculine figure. And in describing the model for Camille Maupin, George Sand, Balzac wrote to Madame Hanska: " . . . she is a man, especially since she wants to be one, and since she has stepped out of a woman's role, and since she is not a woman." 28 Balzac does not contrast the weak-willed Lucien only with the titanic Vautrin. Lucien is measured against two other characters as well, Daniel d'Arthez and David Séchard. They source for the meeting of Lucien and Vautrin. Fernand Baldensperger (Orientations étrangères chez Honoré de Balzac, Paris, 1927, pp. 19-20) says that Balzac probably got his idea from the Arabian Nights, that Lucien and Vautrin are Aladdin and the magician Noureddin. Paul Vernière ("Balzac et la genèse de 'Vautrin'," Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, XLVIII, 1948, 53-68) offers the analogy of Edmond and the tempter Gaudet d'Arras in Restif de la Bretonne's Paysan perverti. I suggest that they may well be the minstrel Raimbaut and the demonic Bertram, in Scribe and Meyerbeer's Robert-le-Diable. * See Karl Abraham, Traum und Mythus (Leipzig and Vienna, 1909), for the psychoanalytical reading of the Prometheus saga. T h e following statements are representative of Abraham's point of view: " T h e oldest form of the Prometheus saga is an apotheosis of man's creative power" (p. 58); " T h e Prometheus saga, in its oldest form, proclaims that masculine creative power is the principle of all life" (p. 61).

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Honoré de Balzac represent the way of life Lucien rejects, the life of serious devotion and concentration, the life of the study and that of the laboratory. Both are among the most idealized figures in the Comédie humaine; they obviously contain Balzac's most elevated ideals and reflect the sides of himself he admired most. D'Arthez functions as a pure-minded Virgil in the Parisian inferno. It is he who most honestly criticizes Lucien's work, who tries to guide the weak-willed poet through Hell and into Purgatory. He envisions the attempt to achieve literary glory as Balzac did, as a bitter struggle which requires concentration, will, and an angelic patience. His motto, like that of the cénacle of which he is chief, is: "suffer courageously and trust in Work." The will to work is his chief virtue; it is one of the features that most clearly distinguish him from Lucien. As leader of the cénacle, d'Arthez recalls two of Balzac's heroes. One is the Catholic democrat, Philippe-JosephBenjamin Buchez, who gathered a circle of young idealists in the Rue des Quatre-Vents in the early years of the Restoration and who, after his separation from the Saint-Simonian cause in 1829, exercised considerable influence on Balzac's political ideas. The other is the fictional figure to whom the founding of Balzac's cénacle is attributed, Louis Lambert. Lambert is perhaps the most angelic of Balzac's characters (if one considers the human population of the Comédie humaine and discounts the true angel, Séraphîtus-Séraphîta) ; he stands at one pole of the fictional cosmos, the other extremity of which is occupied by the artist in evil, Jacques Collin. When, in the midst of Illusions perdues, the death of Louis Lambert is announced, it serves as an additional reproach to Lucien. Lucien is in the process of prostituting the idea, while the Swedenborgian philosopher keeps it pure. So, indeed, does d'Arthez. The same year in which Balzac described the beginnings of d'Arthez's career, he described the end, in Les Secrets de la 1 o9

ICARUS princesse de Cadignan. The action is ten years later than that of Illusions perdues: by this time d'Arthez is a deputy and a respected political philosopher. His life has not changed: Daniel d'Arthez's existence is wholly devoted to work. He goes out for a few moments, from time to time; but the life of society is as unreal to him as a dream. His house is a convent where he leads the life of a Benedictine: the same sobriety in diet, the same regularity in work. The model for this routine should be apparent to anyone who has read Balzac's description of his life in the Lettres ct VEtranger e. He himself tried to convert his apartment into a monastery by wearing a monk's habit while he worked. This quiet existence — Balzac does not mention the more hectic aspects of it — was his ideal image of the artist's life, a life devoted to work, in which the artist's rewards were those of his contemplation of the ideal, of his art itself. L'art pour Fart, as Balzac understood the phrase, meant just this: the artist's rewards are those he finds in silence and in solitude.29 It is in the section of Illusions perdues which deals with David Sechard, Les Souffrtmces de V inventeur, that Balzac described the difficulties of achieving such silence and solitude. The title of the book is itself an indication of Balzac's point of view. Souffrances does indeed mean "suffering"; but I am not sure that a more adequate translation might not be The Passion of David Sechard* Balzac subscribed to the Romantic belief that the great man, poet, scientist, philosopher, was necessarily martyred by his society. He wrote in 1830, in an article entitled "Des artistes": * The obvious analogy to Balzac's title is the full title of Werther. Die Leiden Werther was variously rendered in French as Les Souffrances du jeune Werther (1776), Les Passions du jeune Werther (1777), Les Malheurs du jeune Werther (1792); 1822 saw another Passions du jeune Werther, 1845 another Souffrances (Fernand Baldensperger, Bibliographie critique de Goethe en France, Paris, 1907, pp. 5-7).

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Honoré de Balzac Dante in exile, Cervantes in the poorhouse, Milton in a hovel, Correggio dying of exhaustion under the weight of a load of copper, Poussin unknown, Napoleon on Saint-Helena, — all are images of the divine spectacle presented by Christ on the cross, dying so that he may be reborn, putting off his mortal remains so that he may reign in heaven.30 The same year, Balzac noted that the artist always resembles the proto-martyr to the imagination, Don Quixote, "at grips with some Sancho Panza." The Comédie humaine is full of such instances of the martyrdom of a man of imagination and genius. Louis Lambert is persecuted by his classmates, neglected by a money-hungry society, forced to take refuge in a continual contemplation of the ideal. Balthazar Claës is badgered by creditors and ridiculed by the crowd: "They slandered him, branded him with the name of alchemist, bellowed to his very face: 'He wants to make gold!'" Xavier Rabourdin witnesses the failure of his plans for a massive bureaucratic reform, brought on by the malicious actions of the mediocre people by whom he is surrounded; through it all, he displays "a countenance as serene as that of the Savior when he was crowned with the crown of thorns." In Gambara, Balzac multiplied his images of martyrdom. There is Gambara himself, a poverty-stricken musical genius, who is reduced to playing for pennies in order to make a living. Gambara has written one opera entitled Les Martyrs, another based on the life of Mohammed, a prophet who had to prove himself. And beside these two sublime portraits of the martyred genius stands a parody, the misunderstood chef Giardini, who has poisoned some of Rome's leading citizens with his imaginative dishes. In the case of the painter Joseph Bridau, Balzac identified the martyrdom of the artist with bourgeois distrust of the "artist's life." Finally, in his play, Les Ressources de Quinola — the true title of which, he wrote to Madame Hanska, was L'École des Grands Hommes I I I

ICARUS — he described the fruitless efforts of the inventor Alfonso Fontanarès to keep his ideas from falling into the hands of evil merchants. The last line of the play is the theme of Les Souffrances de Vinventeur as well: "Indeed, I do believe that hell is paved with good inventions." 31 The title tells us something more: Balzac intended to use it for a novel based on the life of Bernard Palissy, an idea he probably conceived in 1832 and on which he said he was working in 1833. 32 What happened to that novel one cannot be sure. That Balzac's original idea contributed to La Recherche de l'absolu (1834) is probable; that it provided a basis for the story of David Séchard seems definite. Balthazar Claës and David Séchard, alchemist and chemist, are both based to some degree on Bernard Palissy, whose experiments covered both fields; in terms of Balzacian archetypes, the search for the absolute and the life of study are indeed one. David Séchard is aware of the parallel to his own situation provided by the life of Palissy, and of the differences between their destinies.33 Palissy was deserted by his wife, but attained a position of wealth and respect. David receives little reward for his efforts; his one consolation is the devotion of his wife Ève. Balzac's image of the ideal artist, as it is incarnated in the figure of David Séchard — who is, really, d'Arthez in another form, strong-willed, studious, disinterestedly devoted to his work — would be incomplete were it not accompanied by the figure of the femme consolatrice. The devoted woman always formed a part of Balzac's reflections on the artist: Del Ryès had Sténie, Raphaël de Valentin had Pauline, Hippolyte Schinner had Adélaïde Leseigneur, and the list may be continued, to include Pauline de Villenoix, Madame Claës, Gillette, Marianna (and the historical parallel in her husband's opera, Mohammed's wife Codighe), Céleste Rabourdin (who asked nothing more than to be Mohammed's wife 3 4 ), Mad1 I 2

Honoré de Balzac ame de La Baudraye, Hortense Steinbock — even Diane de Cadignan, Faustina, and, to a degree, Lisbeth Fischer.* One might conclude the list with Modeste Mignon, whose one desire is to be the devoted wife of a misunderstood genius, and who imitates Bettina Brentano in writing to an unlikelyGoethe, the poet-politician Canalis. The genius's wife or mistress, as Balzac thought of her, plays the part of an "oriental woman," devotes herself body and soul to the great man. "Woman is man's equal," Camille Maupin writes to Calyste du Guénic, "only when she makes her life a continuous offering, as man's is perpetual action." The artist, the demiurgic poet whose life is an endless demonstration of his masculinity, must be consoled and completed by the femme consolatrice, who devotes herself to her husband with as much fervor as he devotes himself to his work, and who repeatedly demonstrates her ideal femininity by mothering her husband, sheltering him from the riot of the world, and ministering to his needs. Whether Balzac's ideal woman may be explained by the Romantic stereotype of the beloved angel, or by his personal needs as one finds them expressed in the letters to Madame Hanska, or, as Baldensperger suggested, by Balzac's reading of the Arabian Nights, it remains true that the figure of the devoted woman is inseparable from that of the devoted artist.35 Illusions perdues shapes up, therefore, as a contrast between the faithful and the apostate, the travailleurs and the oisif. On the one hand stand the devoted artists David and d'Arthez and the devoted woman Ève; on the other stands the ambitious, egocentric Lucien. David and d'Arthez preserve the purity of the idea in their respective searches for the absolute; Lucien descends into the market place, sullies * These are the heroines of Sténie, La Peau de chagrin, La Bourse, Louis Lambert, La Recherche de l'absolu, Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu, Qambara, Les Employés, La Muse du département, La Cousine Bette, Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan, Les Ressources de Quinola, La Cousine Bette.

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ICARUS the idea and is destroyed by the intellectual prostitution of journalism. David and d'Arthez assert their will as Promethean males; Lucien, more a woman than a man, lacks will and fails because of this lack. Lucien is more characteristic of Balzac's artists — in the strict sense, practitioners of the arts — than are his strongwilled companions. The figure of the weak artist, the incomplete genius, appears in various novels of the Comédie humaine. The likely model for all of them was Jules Sandeau, of whom Balzac wrote: "He has no energy, no will. The most beautiful feelings in words, nothing in deed or in reality. No devotion of thought or of body." Lucien's adventures closely parallel those of Sandeau; Balzac himself said that George Sand's first lover was the model for Gennaro Conti and Étienne Lousteau. Balzac's unfortunate acquaintance with Sandeau does not entirely account for the incomplete artists of the Comédie humaine. His own theories of the will contributed a great deal to these characters; and, since the Comédie humaine is largely an Inferno, a collection of bad examples, it is not surprising to find in it these departures from an ideal image of the strong-willed poet.36 There is one more element in Balzac's picture of the incomplete artist: his belief that the artist is a titan only at the moment of creation, that he may well be as helpless as a child at all other times. This may seem to contradict the image of the Promethean poet; but, if one stops to consider the role played by the femme consolatrice, the contradiction disappears. The artist may well have a streak of helplessness in his nature. He may be a Raoul Nathan, who tries to win power and is lost; or a Sylvain Pons, a Willem Schmiicke, lost from the start in a society which puts a premium on selfsufficiency. But if this helplessness intrudes at the moment of creation, if he is a Claude Vignon, paralyzed with doubts in the face of the creative act, he is incomplete. At the

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Honoré de Balzac moment of creation, the will must assert itself, the artist become a demiurge.37 This is amply demonstrated by the case of the Polish sculptor, Wenceslas Steinbock. Balzac attributes his essential weakness to his "Slavic soul"; but it is the same weakness that leads to the destruction of the French Rubempré and the German Schmiicke. Steinbock is a dreamer: he conceives magnificent ideas for statuary and for jewelry, but he is lazy and is unable to execute the works of art he dreams. Between the conception and the execution falls the shadow of Lisbeth Fischer, la cousine Bette. A grotesque parody of the femme consolatrice, she urges Steinbock on; she supplies the will he lacks, and Balzac comments on the reversal of the sexes apparent in their liaison. Bette's weapon is necessity: she forces Steinbock to realize his dreams in metal by keeping him in need, in poverty. Once he begins to sell his work, once he is no longer pressed for money, he reverts to his true character, returns to his dreams and becomes a eunuch of the intelligence.* Like Lucien, he forgets that the one means to success in art is continual devotion and work. He is called, at various times, a dreamer, an opium-eater, a "demi-artist" — and he makes his final appearance, as does Lucien in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, as an "artist in partibus," an artist in name only. Balzac may have loved his Lucien and his Steinbock in their weakness as he loved his Valérie and his Vautrin in their evil; he made it clear nonetheless— both in dramatic contrast and didactic analysis — that his image of the ideal artist was a figure of strength.38 * In his description of Steinbock's decline, Balzac compares the creative act to that of the woman giving birth; but it is a "masculine maternity," the child is ripped from the womb. Balzac is unable to sustain the trope, however: within a f e w lines, he compares the creative act to an heroic action, thereby returning to his usual view, that Promethean creativity is an assertion of masculinity ( C H , V I , 3 1 8 - 3 1 9 ) .

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There is one more group of artists in the Comédie humaine, who stand in another position in relation to the idea. They do not shape the idea and nurture it as do David Séchard and Daniel d'Arthez; they do not destroy it through the prostitution of Lucien de Rubempré or the laziness of Wenceslas Steinbock. They rather submit themselves to its dominion: the abstract idea becomes stronger than the human will. Balzac's ideal may have been the demiurge: no human creator, as Balzac's own career illustrates, can assume the task of shaping a world without taking the risk of destroying himself. The magic powers that Madame Êmile de Girardin (Delphine Gay) attributed to Balzac in her novel, La Canne de M. de Balzac, may only too easily reveal themselves to be diabolically inspired. Submission of the will to the idea is, as Balzac suggests in Gambara, another way of selling one's self to the devil, and the devil is in this case art or thought itself. The thought becomes stronger than the thinker, the creation stronger than the creator; the results are the destruction of thought, the destruction of art, and, as in the case of Balzac, the destruction of the poet himself. Such situations are dealt with in most of the Études philosophiques, many of which were written in the first years of Balzac's intellectual maturity, 1830 and 1831. These tales bear the marks of the frenetic Romanticism of those years, of the influence of Hoffmann's stories and the vogue of the fantastique* At the same time, Balzac published two theoretical statements in the second of his three articles entitled "Des artistes," which are worth examining. The first was an idea * Castex (Le Conte fantastique, p. 45) briefly discusses the possible influence of Hoffmann's tales on Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu. That Hoffmann had been concerned with the limitations of expression in art was pointed out by Philarète Chasles, in a review of Loève-Veimars' translation of the Fantasiestticke, in the Journal des Débats of Saturday, M a y 22, 1830.

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Honoré de Balzac common to many varieties of Romanticism, that there is a poetry which lies beyond expression: When a poet, a painter, a sculptor realizes one of his works with vigor, he is able to do so because the intention and the creation occurred at the same moment. Those are artists' best works. The work on which they set the greatest value is, on the other hand, their worst, because they have lived too long with their idealfigures.They have felt too deeply to portray.39 The passage does indeed reaffirm Balzac's faith in the creative will which is strong enough to overcome the temptations of poetic revery and to produce a work of art; it was, however, the other theoretical statement to which Balzac seems to have given more importance: Thought is somehow unnatural. In the early ages of the world, man was completely external. The arts, moreover, are an abusive overindulgence of thought.40 The idea was, as both the interpreters of Balzac's philosophical tales, Philarète Chasles and Félix Davin, pointed out, an extension of Rousseau's assertion that a thinking man is a depraved animal. But Chasles indicated other analogies, with Byron and with Godwin: The disorder and the ravages that intelligence produces in man, considered both as an individual and as a social being: this is the basic idea which reigns in the works of Byron and of Godwin. M. de Balzac has thrust it into his Tales.41 The work by Byron of which Chasles was thinking — one owes the identification to Balzac — was probably Manfred.42 One might add to it Faust, another drama of the ravages of thought, and, by analogy, Robert-le-Diable, which seems to have left a greater impression on Balzac than did either Goethe's or Byron's play. Godwin was mentioned as the author of Caleb Williams-. Balzac overlooked the actual subject of the novel, the evils of tyranny and class differences; he I 17

ICARUS was struck rather by the way in which the idea of chivalric honor became a passion that drove Ferdinando Falkland, Williams' master, to his death.* The idea of chivalric honor suggests yet another analogy, Don Quixote. The artist-heroes of the Études philosophiques are all Quixotes, destroyed by their attempts to realize a fantastically imaginative ideal; and, like Cervantes, Balzac refuses to take a clear stand on the central issue of the tales: are his heroes mad? He goes to great lengths to demonstrate the absurdity of their particular dadas-, but he repeatedly describes Clavileno as if it were Pegasus and forces the reader to make a decision. The paradigm for all the Études philosophiques is La Peau de chagrin, in which Raphaël de Valentin loses his life to the destructive desires he has conceived. The tales of artists follow the pattern closely. In the earliest, Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu, Balzac described the plight of Maître Frenhofer, a painter, who tries to capture the essence of life itself on canvas through the perfect use of both color and line. In the first version of the story,43 the conflict of art and life, the ideal toward which art strains, was presented most strikingly in the difficult situation of the young François Poussin, caught between the love of his mistress Gillette and his desire to become a great artist. But Frenhofer was even then Balzac's hero; and in 1837 when — probably with the help of Gautier, who was familiar with the technical aspects of painting — Balzac rewrote the story, the tragic adventure of Maître Frenhofer was the part of the tale he expanded. Frenhofer, having dreamed too much, is unable to realize his dreams in a work of art. Yet his plight is more intense than that of Wenceslas Steinbock, for Frenhofer tries to create. Poetry, however, the inexpressible dream, destroys art, the concrete * Balzac had no need to read Godwin's novel: a simplified melodramatic version of Caleb Williafns, first staged early in the nineteenth century, was revived in 1833 at the Théâtre Porte-Saint-Martin (Eric Partridge, The French Romantics' Knowledge of English Literature, Paris, 1924, p. 100).

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Honoré de Balzac object. Frenhofer's painting is a mass of colored splotches; Porbus and Poussin can only judge him mad. But Frenhofer's theories and his painting suggest a sort of proto-cubism. The portrait of "La Belle Noiseuse" is clearly called a masterpiece in the tide of the story. The same ambiguity colors Louis Lambert. Lambert's dream is that of philosophy rather than art; in this instance, the idea destroys the thinker as well as itself. Balzac's Quixotic hero plunges into an intellectual debauchery, saturating his soul with thought as the drunkard saturates his body with alcohol. He gradually divorces himself from the actions of life. While Frenhofer transfers the expression of sexuality to his painting, which he regards as a mistress, Louis Lambert attempts self-castration in an effort to divorce himself completely from the flesh. He drifts into the realm of pure idea, beyond the range of human thought; the external attitude of his state is catalepsy, and he is regarded as mad by everyone except his fiancée Pauline. Yet the ideas to which Lambert devotes himself are Balzac's own theories of will and thought. The conclusion of La Recherche de Vabsolu is much the same. Balthazar Claës, having lost two fortunes in his search for the primal element, having driven his wife to her death, having acquired the reputation of a madman, cries out "Eurêka!" at the moment of his death. Balzac wrote of him that "he had mounted Knowledge, which carried him off, its wings unfolded, far from the world of matter." Louis Lambert, as he himself says in Un Drame au bord de la mer, had mounted the same hippogryph and had come to the same end.44 Balzac's other tales of mad geniuses, Gambara and Massimilla Doni, which were conceived as complementary pieces, both deal with the inexpressible in music, the fates of musicians who are more poets than artists, more involved with conception than with execution. Gambara, the Louis Lambert I 19

ICARUS of music, is either as great a madman or as great a genius as his predecessors. Balzac describes him as "one of the greatest geniuses of our times, the unknown Orpheus of modern music," and Gambara's theories — which culminate in the plan of an opera based on the use of the leitmotif, characterized as an extension of Beethoven's symphonic techniques — prefigure Wagner as Frenhofer's conception of the ideal in painting prefigures cubism. The musical theorists of Massimilla Doni, Cataneo and Capraja, envision a vocal music that would be the equivalent of Gambara's orchestrations. But the two Venetian dukes waste their time in idle theorizing, and Gambara is unable to produce anything but cacophony.46 In Gambara, Balzac suggested what may be the explanation for all these tales of mad poets and artists. At great length, Gambara analyzes Meyerbeer's Robert-le-Diable, especially the final confrontation of Robert and Bertram. One of the analogies he suggests for the scene is the situation of the artistic genius, his own situation. The question asked by Gambara and the other stories is that asked so often during the Romantic period: is genius a blessing or a curse, the gift of God or a pact with the devil? Is the state of artistic enthusiasm a spiritual elevation, or is it a disease of the mind? Horace had written in his satires: "Aut insanit homo, aut versus facit." The painter Salvator Rosa had said, "The greatest poet is he who is most like the madman." Balzac, in the Études philosophiques, dramatized the common concern of the Romantics.* As early as 1830, he had written that the artist "himself does not know the secret of his intelligence. * A t the same time, Gautier dramatized the same concern in "Onuphrius," the story of an admirer of Hoffmann, who loses his sense of the distinction between dream and reality, is destroyed b y the cancerous growth of his imagination. T h e story appears in Les Jeunes-France, but it is obviously anything but a satirical piece. In the eighteen-forties and the eighteen-fifties, the Romantic interest in madness was tragically transformed into reality b y Gérard de Nerval, who referred in Aurélia to "the overflow of dream into real life," the curse of his own genius.

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Honoré de Balzac He performs under the control of certain circumstances, the union of which is a mystery. He does not belong to himself . . . Such is the artist: humble instrument of a despotic will, he obeys a master." 46 4 Leconte de Lisle, writing of Hugo, described the impression he received in the presence of the nineteenth-century Orpheus as that of an enormous will. Baudelaire, in looking back at Balzac, received the same impression; Balzac was for him the most titanic character of the Comédie humaine. The similarity of the two judgments was not accidental. Like Hugo, Balzac saw in the titanic will the essential quality of genius; he believed, as did Hugo, that the mark of the true poet was self-assertion, the impression of the poet's personality on the world around him.47 But while Hugo could reconcile his impulse to dominate with the belief that he was inspired by God, Balzac saw the problems raised by such an association of ideas. If inspiration came from outside the artist, if the idea dominated the man, the titanic will had necessarily to turn on itself and by so doing to destroy itself. This is the situation described in the Études philosophiques, in which "divine inspiration" is all but revealed to be a snare of the devil. Similarly, Hugo looked only at himself, painted only himself, and therefore described only the artist capable of emulating Napoleon and dominating humanity. Balzac was fascinated rather by the deviations from the ideal. Why this was, it is difficult to say; one can only recognize the existence in the Comédie humaine of a great number of incomplete artists, poets without will, who are crushed by their society, corrupted by its temptations, and who fail to assert themselves in the test they must all undergo. While Balzac was writing Illusions perdues, his disciple Charles de Bernard 12 1

ICARUS published Les Ailes d'Icare, the story of an ambitious young man from the provinces who fails to take Paris by assault and returns home resigned, a Rastignac manqué. Balzac could without trouble have adopted Bernard's title for any one of his novels about young artists who boast that they can fly high and are brought low. The moral implicit in Daedalus' warnings to Icarus recurs in Balzac's prefaces as it does in Bernard's novel. The artist, as Balzac thought of him, must be a man with a disciplined life, a disciplined mind, a man capable of concentrating his ideas and of manifesting them by creative activity in the world of action as well as in the world of art. And this ideal was much like Hugo's. Together, Hugo and Balzac present the ideal image of the artist which all but died with the collapse of Romantic activism, the image of the poet who convincingly demonstrates to his society the fact that he is worthy of being a king or a prophet, a leader of men.

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Chapter I V

Alfred de Vigny: The Man in the Ivory Tower Alfred de Vigny's career offers a remarkable parallel to the development of sensibility in the nineteenth century, to the growth and decline of Romantic activism. The nature of his intellectual interests, the influences of which his poetry bears the marks, the way in which he regarded himself, his general attitudes, lead from the first generation of Romanticism, that of Lamartine, Hugo, and Balzac, to the second generation, that of the Parnassians, of Leconte de Lisle, Baudelaire, and Flaubert. With Lamartine, Vigny imitated Chenier and Byron; with Leconte de Lisle, he studied and appreciated Buddhist philosophy. "I have spoken of what I know and what I have suffered," he wrote in his journal; and his attitudes were surely shaped by the needs of his personality, by the accidents of his birth and life. But Vigny's outlook and ideas were also those of writers twenty years younger than he. When the poets of the mid-century looked to an older contemporary for an example of what an artist should be, it was to Vigny that they turned rather than to Lamartine or Hugo or even Balzac. Leconte de Lisle expressed some doubt concerning Vigny's mastery of the art of poetry, but he concluded his study by writing:

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ICARUS . . . we must deem full and happy the destiny of a man rich in exquisite faculties, who lived in a studious and voluntary retirement, absorbed in the contemplation of imperishable things, and who died still faithful to the religion of Beauty. His name and his works will never achieve recognition from the vulgar crowd, but they will survive among that future elite of fraternal souls who would have loved the man and who will hallow the immaculate glory of the artist. F e w artists, wrote Gautier on the occasion of V i g n y ' s death, so realized the ideal of the poet: " . . . he kept his persona pure, calm, poetic." * T h e image of the pure and studious poet, the preserver of faith in art, was the Parnassians' ideal image of the artist; it was also the image V i g n y saw in the mirror of his journal. 1 T h e most important feature of V i g n y ' s career was a gradual withdrawal from public life, a gradual retreat into the Ivory T o w e r of art and contemplation. It was to describe V i g n y ' s life that Sainte-Beuve gave to the phrase tour d'ivoire its current meaning; his retreat, as Sainte-Beuve pointed out, was what distinguished V i g n y from the other R o mantics.f W h i l e Lamartine, Hugo, Musset, and Balzac published their numerous volumes, V i g n y , after some ten years of crowded literary activity, wrote what would constitute a thin collection of poems, published one b y one, separated one from another b y the space of several years. H e had never been very active in the cénacles-, only once did he write an article for a periodical, and then out of a deep sense * Persona here renders the words "physionomie littéraire." t Sainte-Beuve wrote, in a poem addressed to Villemain (Pensées d'août, 1837): ". . . et V i g n y , plus secret,/Comme en sa tour d'ivoire, avant midi, rentrait." For the history of the phrase, see Harry Levin, " T h e Ivory Gate," Yale French Studies, no. 13 (1954), 17-29; and Erwin Panofsky, "In Defense of the Ivory Tower," an address delivered at the annual meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association on the afternoon of Commencement Day, June 13, 1957 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University N e w s Office, 1957: 194).

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Alfred de Vigny of conviction. The attitude he expressed in his works changed from the pity he had allegorized in "Eloa" as an angel born from a tear shed by Christ to the ironic detachment of le Docteur Noir and of a captain stoically facing death on a sinking ship. The potentiality for the attitude of his later life was, of course, with him from his youth; but the thoughts and ideas he recorded in his journal were to a degree concealed behind such public statements as "£loa," Stello, and Chatterton. Yet it is to the thoughts of the young Vigny that one may turn to find the greatest concern of his life, the concern that shaped his image of the poet: the nature and function of the aristocrat.

Vigny, wrote Edmond Esteve, was always convinced that he was as noble as the king. The training he received as an officer in the king's army did nothing to destroy the prejudices he acquired as a son of the nobility. He was born, he felt, with a nature superior to that of other men; his function was to command other men. As a poet, he was no less an aristocrat. The poet, like the noble, receives at birth the genius that is his mark of superiority; the poet, as Vigny thought with the rest of the Romantics, must manifest himself as a leader of men. Vigny published his poems under the name M. le Comte Alfred de Vigny. Almost alone among his contemporaries, he remained faithful to the image of the poet-noble which was nurtured by the genre troubadour, strengthened by the examples of Chateaubriand, Byron, and Goethe. Vigny learned that it was neither as an aristocrat by birth nor as an officer that he could acquire the position of dominance he wanted; neither the temper of the nineteenth century nor his own health would permit it. It was rather as 125

ICARUS a poet, as an aristocrat of the intelligence, that he felt he could achieve the position that was rightfully his.2 He concurred in Hugo's opinion that the poet is a sort of Orpheus, whose function it is to civilize men by revealing to them what he alone can see. In 1824 he noted a comparison in his journal: In the night six months long, the long night of the pole, a traveller climbs a mountain and sees the sun and the day in the distance, while night is at his feet: so the poet sees a sun, a sublime world, and he cries out in ecstasy at the sight of this liberated world, while other men remain plunged in night. The poet's function, as he wrote some ten years later, is to guide the ship of state by reading in the stars the route indicated by God. In the ideal republic, the poet and the priest lead the people; the warrior fills a subservient position. Vigny concurred as well in accepting the nineteenth-century myth of progress, for which he employed the image of a clock. The pendulum is the inexorable law of progress itself. The hour hand is the slowly moving mass of men, the minute hand is the smaller group of enlightened citizens, and the second hand is the poetic genius: "I have never looked at [the second hand] without thinking that the poet always does and always should walk rapidly ahead of the ages, in advance of the general spirit of his nation, even ahead of his more enlightened compatriots." He noted in his journal, the same year 1829: "Woe to the laggards! T o linger behind is death." 8 Vigny's goal was rather a spiritual than a political one: "to moralize and to spiritualize the nation." He never thought of himself as a lyric poet. He considered himself a moralist who wrote poèmes philosophiques, epic and dramatic fragments which pointed a definite lesson. But he learned rather quickly that the nation would not be "spiritualized" by his poems:

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Alfred de Vigny The masses go forward like the packs of blind men in Egypt, striking at random with their imbecile staffs those who shove them back, those who turn them aside, and those who precede them on the highway. In the revolution of 1830, which was for Hugo a revelation of man's march to the socialist Utopia, Vigny found proof of the stupidity of the race, which tottered from the theory of divine right to that of popular sovereignty. His own concept was that of an aristocracy of the intelligence, a sort of spiritual Fronde, which would perform the functions of Plato's guardians: To subject the world to the unlimited domination of those superior souls in whom resides the greater share of divine intelligence, should be my goal — and that of all the strong men of this age. Vigny saw in the great number of men merely an "idiot mass," which had to be guided by the "superior souls," the "strong men," the "aristocracy of the intelligence." Democracy, he felt, was a desert. The proletariat glorified mediocrity and stupidity, which were embalmed and preserved in newspapers, the people's voice. Two races composed the w:orld, the noble and the ignoble: "They are really two races which can never understand each other and which could never live side by side." 4 Vigny incarnated his image of the poet-noble, the superior, strong man, in the figure of André Chénier. Chénier, as he appears in Stello, is the natural leader, around whom his fellow political prisoners collect. In the opposition of Chénier and Robespierre, Vigny portrayed the eternal opposition of the true aristocrat and the parvenu. Only once did he himself try to obtain the power he so deeply wanted. In 1848, having failed in his bid for the position of ambassador to London, he presented himself as candidate for election to the 127

ICARUS Assemblée Nationale. However, true to his scorn for the "ignoble," he refused to campaign. He merely circulated a statement of candidacy, a statement of inflexibility and moral righteousness.5 Naturally enough, Vigny lost the election. He never abjured his theories of the "aristocracy of the intelligence"; some of the last notes in his journal were devoted to it. On the other hand, he seems to have decided that a poet could never fill the position of "guardian"; Napoleon III was the "strong man," the intelligent despot in whom he put his faith.8 Yet even in his early manhood, Vigny was convinced that his ideal was one that would never be popular. As a noble, he was a member of an accursed race; as a noble and a poet, he was doubly accursed.* 7 The Romantic equation of superiority and malediction colored Vigny's thought from the first. In "Moïse" he created an emblem for the concept: the man elected by God feels that his election is in itself a kind of punishment: "Que vous ai-je donc fait pour être votre élu?" The very men he must lead fear him; he is unable to enjoy the simple pleasures of life. But, like the majority of the French Romantics, Vigny most often saw in the curse of genius the rejection of the poet by the crowd. The theme he adopted was that of the pariah, a theme which had been in the air since Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's tale, La Chaumière indienne (1791). The hero of this philosophical tale was rather the peasant sage than the accursed poet; but the popularity of the figure of the pariah was largely due to this early incarnation. In 1820 Casimir Delavigne had written an Indian tragedy, Le Paria, the pro#

Pierre Flottes (in La Pensée politique et sociale d'Alfred de Vigny, Paris, 1927, pp. 36-37) suggests that Vigny's Moses is a noble rather than a poet, that in 1822 Vigny's sense of isolation was merely that of the noble in a middle-class society. V i g n y himself wrote that Moses was indeed the man of poetic genius; but his gloss occurred in a letter written in 1838 (Correspondance, ed. Léon Séché, Paris, n.d., I, 101).

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Alfred de Vigny tagonist of which was an outcaste who masqueraded successfully as a warrior chief. Again, Delavigne's hero was not a poet; but he was — like René, like Manfred — a superior being rejected by a mediocre world. The terms in which he explains his situation suggest numerous passages in the works of Vigny: Il est sur ce rivage une race flétrie, Une race étrangère au sein de sa patrie; Sans abri protecteur, sans temple hospitalier, Abominable, impie, horrible au peuple entier, Les Parias . . . Vigny devoted three of his major works to this "epic of disillusionment," to the examination of the superior man who is also an outcast. Cinq-Mars dealt with the noble, Servitude et grandeur militaires with the soldier, Stello with the "intelligent pariah," the poet.8 The question posed by Stello is the question of Romantic activism: can the poet take an active part in the life of his times? Stello's motive is pity: he is simply an incarnation of emotion, and he feels deeply for the suffering mass of men. But this figure of the sensitive poet is balanced by that of the ironic analyst, le Docteur Noir. While Stello feels, le Docteur Noir weighs and examines. He proves that the poet is never allowed to participate in the life of his nation, that he is banished, as Plato banished Homer from his republic, by the representatives of power, whether that power be a monarchy, a representative government, or a revolutionary republic. Poets, wrote Vigny, compose "the race always cursed by those who hold temporal power"; their fate is perpetual ostracism. The reason is jealousy: Robespierre envies the superior nature of Chénier, John Bell that of Chatterton. Looking back on Stello in 1841, Vigny wrote: "The issue was valid. Because his realm is the infinite, the artist is hated by the politician, who sees only the present moment." The

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ICARUS artist is a Don Quixote, a man of the imagination, displaced in a vulgar and materialistic society.9 It is not only the representatives of power who reject poets; the masses themselves, the people for whom the poet hopes to act, distrust and despise him. Vigny intended to write a second consultation du Docteur Noir to illustrate the point. The fragment entitled Daphne and scattered notes in the journal are all that he ever managed to produce. His hero was Julian the Apostate — poet and emperor, a philosopher who intended to spiritualize his people by converting them to a refined form of paganism. Julian's ideas were rejected, and he himself died. Le Docteur Noir points the moral: "It is the eternal friction between man the spiritual being and man the material being, a rough embrace in which the former will have to suffer for a long time to come." 10 In the narrative portion of Daphne, the philosopher Libanius advises Julian to follow the program he had suggested in the Misopogon, to write for the Muses and for himself. Vigny's reaction to the crowd's ostracism of the poet was a refusal to cater to the crowd. Like Stendhal, he addressed himself to the "happy few." As early as 1825, he wrote to Victor Hugo, "I believe that we must allow poetry to dwell in the upper regions of society, as it does in the human mind. Mud spoils its dress." He believed that popularity was a mark of inferiority: the vulgar crowd would accept only the poetry that had been cheapened, rendered gross. When Quitte pour la peur was received with a lack of comprehension, Vigny noted in his journal: "The masses hate me, they yield of necessity to my books, imposed upon them by poets and philosophers; but they feel the scorn I have for them and they give it back to me as hatred." A lack of popularity, he believed, was the mark of great literature. The only approval the poet should seek in the present is that of the aristocracy of the intelligence; the only popularity he should desire is

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Alfred de V i g n y among posterity, when the hour hand will have finally caught up with the rush of the second hand, the rapid march of genius.11 Behind Vigny's feelings of rejection, his scorn for the crowd, lay a distaste for life itself. He saw in the people a mass of barbarians, who sacked libraries during the revolution of 1830 as they had during the burning of Alexandria.* He saw in humanity itself a race of monsters from which he wanted to escape. Man's lot in the world, he wrote in his journal many times, is that of a prisoner 12 who does not know why he has been imprisoned, when he will be released, or what will happen to him when he is free. And the lot of the poet is more severe than that of other men: "The poet is always unhappy, because nothing replaces for him what he sees in his dreams." 13 The horrors of the world are more visible in contrast to the beauties of art. Vigny's final reaction to this situation was his retirement into the Ivory Tower, into the fortress of his own conscience. His initial reaction was quite different. It was the plea for pity that dictated Vigny's Stello, the call to compassion for the fate of the rejected poet. Even Stello, a discursive work of fiction which is often rather ironic, was not enough. Some two years after the appearance of the book, Vigny transformed the second anecdote recounted by the dispassionate Docteur Noir into a direct appeal to an audience, the play Chatterton.

A t midnight on February 12, 1835, Vigny wrote in his journal the somewhat ironic note: "Chatterton is a success." During the performance, he had observed the audience * On February IJ, 1831, mobs pillaged the archepiscopal residence in Paris, hurled the books from its library into the Seine. Vigny describes the scene in lurid colors, in Daphne (OC, II, 86j).

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ICARUS through a hole in the scenery; he had watched the spectators as, gradually, they accepted his point of view. After the final curtain, his friends had come to him weeping, had embraced him. "They stammered disconnected words, cries: my friend, my friend, — They too have suffered the martyrdom that I described." 14 But Vigny's Chatterton was not so original as he felt it was; it was the culmination of a longdeveloping attitude. The image of the poet as a weak and sensitive soul was a stereotype which dated from the eighteenth century. Gilbert, a few days before he died, wrote an ode imitated from the Psalms, in which he lamented his untimely death: Au banquet de la vie, infortuné convive, J'apparus un jour, et je meurs: Je meurs, et sur ma tombe où lentement j'arrive, Nul ne viendra verser des pleurs.

The poem won favor among the pseudo-classic and pre-Romantic elegiac poets; the swan-song became an accepted genre. Chénier, before the approach of his execution precipitated his emergence as a brilliant satirist, posed as a new Gilbert: Je meurs. Avant le soir j'ai fini ma journée. A peine ouverte au jour, ma rose s'est fanée. La vie eut bien pour moi de volages douceurs; Je les goûtais à peine, et voilà que je meurs.

Madame de Staël devoted a chapter to the "Dernier Chant de Corinne." The Almanach des Muses published the "Adieux à la vie" of the tubercular Dorange, who envisioned himself welcomed into heaven by Gilbert. Millevoye, who also had the good fortune to be tubercular, compared himself to an autumn leaf — I 32

Alfred de Vigny E t je meurs! De la vie à peine J'avais compté quelques instants; E t j'ai vu comme une ombre vaine S'évanouir mon beau printemps.

He wrote an elegy entitled "Le Poète mourant" which assured his reputation as the model poète poitrinaire, and which inspired Charles Loyson and the perfectly healthy Holmondurand and Lamartine. The vogue of the dying poet was so widespread by the early eighteen-twenties that the reactionary Andrieux could shriek, while he brandished a copy of the Méditations, "Blubberer! . . . You bewail your lot! . . . You are tubercular! . . . What difference does that make to me? . . . The dying poet, the dying poet . . . All right, then! die, you ass, you won't be the first!" And M. de Silphiclore, Baour-Lormian's caricature of a Romantic poet, could say: Une frêle santé distingue tout poëte Qui d'un autre Apollon se proclame interprète . . . Schiller, Byron portaient sur leur face amaigrie Le cachet du malheur et de la rêverie.

Joseph Delorme, Boulay-Paty's Élie Mariaker, and Vigny's own languorous Stello were merely more fully developed representatives of the same type.* 1 5 By the time Vigny wrote Stello, however, a new interest had developed, a concern for poets who might have lived, who died not because they were tubercular, but by their own hand.f Rousseau had written an apology for suicide in La * Marc Citoleux (in Alfred de Vigny: persistances classiques et affinités étrangères, Paris, 1924, p. 487) suggests that Vigny's presentation of the passive dying poet was influenced b y Sainte-Beuve's Joseph Delorme. Évariste Boulay-Paty's Élie Mariaker (1834) was an obvious imitation of Delorme-. it contains the "life" and "poems" of a fictitional poet. Like Sainte-Beuve, Boulay-Paty remained an "anonymous editor." t A s so often, English literature presents an example far earlier than anything in French. Thomas Warton the Younger wrote a poem entitled " T h e 1

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ICARUS Nouvelle Héloïse, Goethe had provided an example in the lamentable destiny of Werther, Charles Nodier had naturalized Wertherism in Le Peintre de Saltzbourg and Les Tristes. The Chatterton legend was well known before Vigny wrote Stello. Thoughts of suicide were almost considered a necessary attribute of the sensitive soul. "Pourquoi ne pas mourir?" asks Joseph Delorme: Quand la Pauvreté seule, au sortir du berceau, M'a pour toujours marqué de son terrible sceau, Qu'elle a brisé mes vœux, enchaîné ma jeunesse, Pourquoi ne pas mourir? De ce monde trompeur Pourquoi ne pas sortir sans colère et sans peur, Comme on laisse un ami qui tient mal sa promesse.18

Two years later, in 1831, the Almanach des Muses published a short elegy, "Mon Chant funèbre," by the young poet Victor Escousse. It was simply another instance of the "dying poet" masquerade, but it was prophetic as well. Early in 1832, the year in which Stello appeared, Escousse and his collaborator Auguste Lebras suffocated themselves, leaving the stupefied Béranger to mourn their passing: Quoi! morts tous deux dans cette chambre close, O ù de charbon pèse encor la vapeur! Leur vie, hélas! était à peine éclose: Suicide affreux! triste objet de stupeur! 17

In the eighteen-thirties, suicide was thought to be so common an occurrence that the Lycanthrope Petrus Borel published a modest proposal: that the government should establish selfservice guillotines throughout France, should charge a mere Suicide," in which a cherub convinces the dead poet's shade that religion should have kept him from doing away with himself. T h e apology for suicide, on the other hand, belongs to the later eighteenth century. Suicide reached Italy when it reached France, in the wake of Werther and in the form of U g o Foscolo's Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1799, 1802).

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Alfred de Vigny hundred francs for the use of the machine — each year, he calculated, would bring a revenue of at least 30,295,000 francs! 18 Vigny's Chatterton absorbed these common ideas of Romanticism and concentrated them in a form which was equally familiar to his audience. In spite of the author's insistence that the play was a philosophical study, a "drama of thought," in which "material action counts for litde," 1 9 Chatterton was basically a melodrama. The foggy atmosphere, the important staircase, even the English setting, were inherited from the plays of Pixerecourt. The chief characters were adaptations of types that belonged to the melodrama and to its novelistic equivalent, the roman noir. The typical cast of such works included the persecuted young girl, the virtuous jeune premier, the tyrant, and the benevolent protector. It is easy to see their descendants in the hard-pressed Kitty Bell, the "young Lacedemonian," 20 Thomas Chatterton, the cruel industrialist, John Bell, and the kindly Quaker. Such a cast permitted Vigny to strengthen his plea for pity by showing his audience two martyrs instead of one. Chatterton is not the only victim of John Bell's persecution; in fact, he is merely a subsidiary victim. Much of the pathetic quality in the play is supplied by the plight of Kitty Bell — the section of Stello devoted to Chatterton is entitled "Histoire de Kitty Bell," and the role written for Marie Dorval is in many ways the most appealing role in Vigny's play. It is with Kitty's trembling at the voice of her husband that the play opens; Kitty's death — which Madame Dorval rendered more dramatic by rolling down the staircase from Chatterton's room — provides the drama's final moment of pathos. In Kitty, Chatterton's fernme consolatrice, Vigny resurrected the angel of pity he had portrayed in "£loa"; her fate at the hands of John Bell, a reenactment of the angel's fall under the influence of Satan, contributed immeasurably to the tone of the play.

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ICARUS Nevertheless, Chatterton stands at the center of the drama. He is the most Romantic of heroes, as the play is the most Romantic of plays; for Chatterton subsumes more than the character of the lamentable dying poet. He contains as well the qualities of the martyred genius, the poet who seems to be expiating in suffering the superior nature he has received from God. When the Quaker reproaches him for being too good, too pure, Chatterton replies, " . . . I have made up my mind not to disguise myself, and to be myself to the very end, always to listen to my heart, whether it speaks in compassion or in indignation, to resign myself to fulfilling the law of my being." He is a man of feeling, unable to staunch the flow of his emotions; he is a man of imagination as well, and he can no more deny his dreams than he can the voice of his heart: " . . . I have never been able to curb the tumultuous overflowing of my soul in straight and narrow canals. It has always flooded its banks, in spite of me." And, in line with the Romantic ethic, Chatterton knows that his gifts are a curse. The Quaker need not point out that "imagination and introversion are two diseases that no one pities"; Chatterton himself calls his poetic genius "the fatal enemy born with me, the bad fairy which was surely with me in the cradle." He feels, as did all the fatal heroes from René to Manfred, the weight of impending doom: he cannot rid himself of his superior nature, he must accept the destiny of martyrdom that is necessarily his.21 The specific manifestation of the curse of genius that Chatterton feels most strongly is that one common to French Romanticism, the displacement of the poet in modern society. He pretends to the Orphic mission, but he admits that he has neither a definite rank nor a definite function. His gifts — feeling and dream — render him incapable of doing anything but fulfilling the law of his being, that is, of remaining a poet. Chatterton's destiny is played out in John Bell's shop: the 136

Alfred de V i g n y poet is surrounded by the utensils of a mercantile and industrial society, which is personified in the fat and stuffy Lord Mayor Beckford and, still more, in the figure of John Bell himself. John Bell represents everything Vigny and his fellow Romantics hated. He is a merchant, an egoist, a utilitarian. " A real calculator lets nothing useless exist around him," he informs the Quaker after he has dismissed a number of his overworked employees. "Everything, animate or inanimate, should bring in a profit." In a society of Bells and Beckfords, the poet — who "produces" nothing of utilitarian value — is sadly out of place. Chatterton comes to the realization that "[his] life gets in everyone's way." John Bell may be "righteous according to the law"; the phrase is almost a leitmotif. But the poet, as Chatterton says, has his own law, the law of his nature, from which he cannot turn. The opposition of the marvelous boy and John Bell reflects Rousseau's original concern, the relationship of the individual to society. In spite of his frequent fulminations against universal suffrage and his belief that government should be turned over to the strong men of the age, Vigny shared the Romantic notion that society is almost invariably wrong, the individual invariably right.22 It is this thought that dictated the preface Vigny wrote for Chatterton, in which he treated didactically the themes dramatized in the play. The law, wrote Vigny, is wrong: materialistic societies exploit intelligent individuals. If the individual is a poet, whose nature prohibits such exploitation — since the poet is incapable of relinquishing his dreams and of participating in commercial or industrial activity — society is indifferent to his fate. Instead of supplying him with bread and time, the only two things he needs, it crushes him, drives him to suicide. "This suicide," Vigny wrote to the translators of Chatterton's works, in 1839, "was a murder committed by society." 23 In his preface, in an article inspired 1

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ICARUS by a visit from the unfortunate Mademoiselle Sedaine (1841), in projects recorded in his journal,24 Vigny pleaded for an extension of copyright laws, for the creation of government pensions for young poets struggling to establish their reputations. There is, however, a certain difficulty in Vigny's presentation of Chatterton's suicide. In the play itself, it is a conscious act: Chatterton comes to the realization that he is de trop, opts for suicide. It was this conscious choice, in fact, that differentiated Vigny's Chatterton from the "marvelous boy" of the legend, who died — as Hayley put it — "stung to madness by the world's neglect," who drank poison in a frenzy of despair. Chatterton, for Vigny, was a sort of stoic sage, who chose to make a "reasonable exit," to escape from the prison of a life he did not create and which he was unable to accept. Yet in the preface, Vigny, borrowing a comparison from Byron's Giaour, insisted that the poet was no more responsible for his suicide than the scorpion "girt by fire," which stung itself to escape from a ring of burning coals. "Society throws him in the embers." The image of the delicate poet murdered by society subsists in the play itself. Vigny's Chatterton retains, in spite of his military and ecclesiastic air, his Promethean gaze, the physical weakness and the delicate sensibility of all the dying poets from the tubercular Dorange to Joseph Delorme. The atmosphere of the play, heavy with the pathos due to the character and death of the angelic Kitty Bell, is suggestive of sentimentality instead of stoicism. In dramatizing the "Histoire de Kitty Bell," in replacing le Docteur Noir by the austere but sympathetic Quaker, Vigny lost the quality he considered the true originality of Stello, the "mixture of irony and of sentimentality in the tales told by the Docteur Noir." The balance of irony and compassion is upset; and the sentimentality of the play degenerates into sensiblerie.2B 138

Alfred de Vigny In the years following the first production of Chatterton, Vigny noted in his journal the same sympathetic reaction he had found in the first-night audience. In 1840, at the first revival, he wrote, "Cries of bravo, applause, a woman swooned." In 1857, he remarked "ardent, prolonged outbursts of sympathy." Another old Romantic, Théophile Gautier, attended that performance of Chatterton in 1857. He wrote sympathetically of the "frail victims who would rather die than renounce their dreams," but he was amused to find that the only character in the play who seemed to have any common sense was the villain, John Bell.26 Vigny did not have to wait twenty years for criticisms of his play. Chatterton touched some hearts: Musset was moved, and the ill-starred Hégésippe Moreau found in the play a dramatization of his own suffering. Others were not so kind. Dupeuty and Duvert, authors of Comoro, a parody of Hugo's Angelo, took time out to answer Vigny's plea for pity: Le meurtre et l'affreux suicide Nous poursuivent partout de leur face livide; Chatterton s'empoisonne au lieu de travailler; Et quelle est la morale, enfin? un escalier; Escalier curieux! Espèce de symbole Qui semble nous montrer comment l'art dégringole. The vaudevillistes were merely echoing the cruel review written by Gustave Planche. In his preface to the play, Vigny was careful to say that he had deliberately altered the facts of Chatterton's life to create an exemplum of the poet's destiny; he was probably trying to answer Planche, who dismissed the play as a complete falsehood. Chatterton, wrote the critic, was a self-centered, bitter little boy, who killed himself out of pride. His suicide was a form of revenge, since he had found no fortune he deemed worthy of him. The only literary work that would honestly deal with Chatterton's life, Planche continued, would be a tragedy of pride. The review of the play 1

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ICARUS which appeared in UArtiste made the same point; the anonymous reviewer had no use for Chatterton or Escousse or Lebras, "poor fellows who took their own lives rather than struggle any longer!" Barbier reported in his Souvenirs that Balzac was more vehement than anyone. "What!" said Balzac, according to Barbier, "history offers you a frightful little joker, a plagiarist, a monster of pride and ingratitude, and M. de Vigny turns him into a gentleman, a hero of sentiment, who passes his time wooing his host's wife, kills himself so that he won't have to work, and as he lies dying makes all sorts of stupid remarks about the social order of his country." Lucien de Rubempre was, in some respects, Balzac's answer to Vigny. Like Chatterton, Lucien came to the metropolis from the provinces, dreaming of glory and sure of his genius. Like the historical Chatterton, he wrote pamphlets for both the government and the opposition.* Lucien, too, committed suicide. Lucien was the Realist's answer to the Romantic: while Vigny portrayed the delicate and overly sensitive Chatterton as an image of the ideal poet, Balzac painted in Lucien a clear departure from the ideal, an incomplete artist.27 Vigny himself finally rejected the suppliant attitude he had assumed in writing Chatterton. Years before, in 1833, he had written that he was able to repress his feminine sensibility by the exercise of his enormous will and his pride; after 1838, this was his constant attitude. The rupture with Marie Dorval was no doubt largely responsible for Vigny's definitive change of mind: woman was for him no longer £loa, the angel of pity, Kitty Bell, the femrne consolatrice. She was Delilah, "la Femme, enfant malade et douze fois impur!" But the failure of his plea for pity in the name of the suffering poet seems to * In so doing, Lucien belied a statement about him made early in Illusions perdues by Sixte du Chatelet: "poor and modest, the boy was a Chatterton without political cowardice, without the ferocious hatred of the upper classes that drove the English poet to write pamphlets against his benefactors" (CH, IV, 504).

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A l f r e d de V i g n y have been no less responsible. He noted in his journal in 1839, the year of the publication of "La Colère de Samson," that one can easily win the pity of women— . . . but the public is composed of both sexes and winning the sympathy of mocking men, your natural enemies and rivals, is rather insipid. You must not admit to them that you are suffering. It is more noble. Years later, he wrote that he had pleaded not for himself, but for those poets who could not defend themselves.28 "La Bouteille à la mer" 29 (1847) explained Vigny's retreat into the Ivory Tower. The entire poem is an outgrowth from a single image in Chatterton. Vigny's martyred poet had compared England to a ship, of which the poet was to be the guide, an Orpheus who read God's message written in the stars. The ship in "La Bouteille à la mer" sails in quest of truth rather than of poetry; it is the vehicle of intellectual pursuit rather than the ship of state. The hero of the adventure is, this time, truly a stoic sage: as the ship sinks beneath him, he refuses to weep; he is indeed the captain of his soul. His only interest is in the precious information he has recorded in his log-book, which he puts in a bottle with a note that reads: "—Ci-joint est mon journal, portant quelques études Des constellations des hautes latitudes. Qu'il aborde, si c'est la volonté de Dieu!"30 It is the idea alone that matters and not the man. Vigny's poem is a fable, "advice to an unknown young man"; the fable illustrates a dictum propounded in the poem's opening lines: Oubliez les enfants par la mort arrêtés; Oubliez Chatterton, Gilbert et Malfilâtre; De l'œuvre d'avenir saintement idolâtre, Enfin, oubliez l'homme en vous-même. . . 31 Vigny did not, of course, forget the man in himself; he did,

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ICARUS however, bare himself only before his journal. The few poems he wrote after "La Bouteille a la mer" are impersonal, Parnassian poems, successors to the epic and dramatic fragments Vigny had written in the eighteen-twenties. It is to the later Poemes philosophiques and to the journal that one must look for the concerns of Vigny's later years. —

3

—

Writing of himself in the third person, in 1848, Vigny said: His one ambition is to take his head in his hands and to write what he thinks. All he needs is a corner, a little black corner like Alceste's, but it must be black and silent, far from the shouts, far from the songs of the streets.* He had written long before, in Stello, that the poet must isolate himself from the crowd: "Alone and free, accomplish one's mission . . . Solitude is holy." The phrase was Vigny's favorite. While Hugo kept repeating that "the poet has the cure of souls," Vigny retired into the Ivory Tower, to save his soul alone. The comparison of himself to Alceste was in no way a mistake: Vigny's misanthropy became only more marked as he grew older. Using a metaphor that would become current in the second half of the nineteenth century, he wrote to Brizeux in 1852 that he had witnessed spectacles worthy of the Byzantine Empire. And he continued: "Yes, solitude is holy. Yes, it is in solitude that one rediscovers the calm one must have to forget everything vile and wicked." At the same moment, Leconte de Lisle proclaimed that the poet must take refuge in "a sanctuary of repose and purification." It was not without reason that Vigny compared himself to a monk, that he considered entering a Trappist monastery.32 * It is significant that Vigny darkened Alceste's retreat. Moliere's Misanthrope asked to be left "In this dark little corner, with my black humor" ( V , i, 104).

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Alfred de Vigny But the image of the "little black corner" suggests more than a silent study; black and silent, far from the songs of the street, it suggests a grave. Vigny's retirement was clearly an escape from life itself. "I don't like the outer life; I grow tired and sad at the sight of its ugliness,"33 he wrote in 1850. His defense against the moral and physical ugliness of life was his retirement into the fortress of his own mind. Vigny's retreat was first of all the assertion of his independence. "Individual liberty is dignity," he wrote in 1847, anticipating the theories of John Stuart Mill. He was a man alone, refusing to be a member of the crowd, refusing to admit his suffering to the crowd. He realized, in this refusal to weep — which was a refusal to write, as well — the stoic faith he had always admired in Julian the Apostate, which he had tried to portray in the deaths of Gilbert and Chénier, and which he had first seen in his father's death. But the stoicism was more than bravery in the face of death. The voice of God failed Vigny as did the voice of the ferrane consolatrice-, his silence and disdain were answers to God as well as to man: Si le Ciel nous laissa comme un monde avorté, Le juste opposera le dédain à l'absence Et ne répondra plus que par un froid silence Au silence éternel de la Divinité. The image of "le juste," the stoic sage, was the ideal image of the poet Vigny developed in his later years.34 For the retreat into the Ivory Tower is not only an escape, not only an assertion of independence. It is a flight into the realms of the ideal, the only activity worth pursuing. The key words of Vigny's journal, the two concepts to which he always returned, were those of poésie and pensée, which were for him equivalent terms. He had always found his greatest pleasure in the acts of the mind. He noted as early as 1828 that the very act of writing was a pleasure for him: 1

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ICARUS There is, moreover, something in me more powerful [than the hope of success] to make me write: the bliss of inspiration, a joyous ecstasy that far surpasses the corresponding ecstasy which inebriates us in a woman's arms. The sensual pleasure of the soul is longer-lasting . . . The ecstasy of the mind is superior to physical ecstasy. It is this assimilation of the sexual act and poetic creation that explains " L a Maison du berger." Éva, to whom the poem is addressed, is not a woman; she is the Muse, or the spirit of poetry itself. When Vigny invites her to come into solitude with him, to protect him from the horrors of modern life — the material horrors represented by the railroad, the spiritual ugliness represented by the perversion of poetry — and from the indifference of nature, he is not thinking of beginning a new affair. He is thinking rather of the consoling value of art. He will see the world, he says, reflected in her gaze — Éva, j'aimerai tout dans les choses créées, Je les contemplerai dans ton regard rêveur Qui partout répandra ses flammes colorées, Son repos gracieux, sa magique saveur. Art, he noted in 1850, is "the magic mirror of life, more beautiful than life itself." Baudelaire, with the lesson of Gautier behind him, would adopt the same image in "La Beauté": . . . j'ai, pour fasciner ces dociles amants, De purs miroirs qui font toutes choses plus belles: Mes yeux, mes larges yeux aux clartés éternelles! The cult of which Vigny was an adept was the cult of beauty, the cult of poetry. As in the lines I have quoted from " L a Maison du berger," he identified, as did so many of the Romantics, poetry and dream. His own life, he wrote, was an endless dream, from which conversation and social activity were distractions. But he never was a Lamartine or a Hugo. As early as 1829 he wrote that "Lamartine is a poet of inebria-

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Alfred de Vigny tion, limitless, formless."* In 1837 he drastically modified the Romantic notion of ebullience by writing that poetry is "crystallized Enthusiasm." The notion of the crystal was as important to Vigny as that of the sexual nature of the poetic act: the two concepts were complementary. He noted in 1842: Lamartine often says that [poetry] is only a sensual pleasure. That may be true of its form; but what prevents it from being a sensual pleasure enveloping thought and making it luminous by the brilliance of its preserving crystal? In "La Maison du berger" he identified poetry with a diamond, which had the power to preserve thoughts — Ce fin miroir solide, etincelant et dur, Reste de nations mortes, durable pierre . . . He compared himself to a sculptor, and in this he was in agreement, not with his own generation, but with the Parnassians, with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle and Bouilhet.35 Yet, in another sense, Vigny did not think of poetry in terms of the creation of a work of art, as did the Parnassians, f He refused to define "poesie" etymologically, as "production." "Poetry is the supreme Beauty of things," he wrote in 1851, "and the ideal contemplation of that beauty." He called his attitude Atticism, the appreciation of all beauty; and he equated the beauty of poetry with the beauty of the idea, of philosophy. His life in the Ivory Tower was not that of a pure artist, but that of a student and of a thinker. His activity was * Vigny's judgment was ratified by the famous gibe of Jules Renard: "Lamartine dreams five minutes and he writes an hour. Art is the opposite" (Journal, Paris, 1927, II, 569/). t He was, after all, a member of the first generation of Romanticism. " W h a t ! " he wrote in his journal in 1832, "isn't my thought beautiful enough to get along without the help of words and the harmony of sounds? Silence is Poetry itself for me" (OC, II, 941). Keats had written not too long before that unheard melodies are sweetest; a Parnassian would have dismissed both statements with a shrug.

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ICARUS not creation but meditation. He wrote in 1852, "Study for the sake of Study is what one ought to say, rather than Art for Art's sake." The year before his death, 1862, he described the spirit of study — or perhaps, the spirit of contemplation — as if it were a woman, a companion who looked over his shoulder as he read. If he never gave up the opinion that poetry was somehow better than philosophy, it was probably because he, like the Romantics in general, was a student of Madame de Staël, of Joubert, and of Chateaubriand: the supremacy of poetry was an idea inherited from them.38 The important fact about both poetry and philosophy, art and study, was that they were activities of the mind alone. While Hugo and Balzac dreamed of translating their ideas into actions, Vigny insisted on the necessity of keeping ideas pure from "the profaning whirlwind of action." He expressed this attitude publicly in 1829, in the "Lettre à L o r d " 1 " which served as a preface to his translation of Othello. His journal is crowded with reflections on the same theme. "If you want to remain pure," he wrote in 1832, "you must not try to influence men. The application of ideas to things is merely a loss of time for those who create thoughts." The same year he dramatized this idea in Stello. In Servitude et grandeur militaires he recorded the mistake he had made in his youth, that of following his generation into battle when he should have devoted himself to contemplation. He criticized Lamartine for having become drunk with an idea, for having lost control of his will. The poet, he felt, should never become a slave to his idea but should master it: "If the Poet is stronger than the Idea, he moulds it, forms it, and sets it in motion." Once again, Vigny's thought foreshadows the theories of the Parnassians.37 The work in which Vigny intended to develop these ideas was never written; there remain of it only fragments in the journal, and the narrative entitled Daphne. Vigny's intention, however, is clear. His hero, Julian the Apostate, was to come

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Alfred de Vigny to the realization that his attempt to spiritualize the masses was fruitless, that the purity of thought should never be endangered by the grossness and ugliness of action. Julian's death, according to Vigny, was not an accident of battle, but, like Chatterton's, a "reasonable exit," a retirement from the world into the silence and darkness of the grave.38 Vigny's own retirement was a symbolic reenactment of this "reasonable exit." The concerns of his last years were completely limited to the glorification of thought and the intelligence. He read Buddhist philosophy and appreciated the recommendations he found therein of the contemplative life. He considered writing an epic poem, the sense of which was to be that "only the acts of the intelligence [are] great acts." Homer, he noted, glorified the heroes of the physical life: "Today we must sing those of the soul." 39 Vigny's last work expressed his conviction that he had realized the image of the ideal poet, that he had demonstrated the superiority of thought. He had noted in his journal in 1856: "I am the first of my name to be famous, and the last to bear my name. My name, like the swan, sings as it dies."40 "L'Esprit pur" was an elaboration of this theme. Vigny did not attempt to deny his ancestry: he was still M. le Comte Alfred de Vigny, as aware of his nobility as he had been when he published his first poems. But he contrasted his own life with that of his warrior ancestors, "dès qu'ils n'agissaient plus, se hâtant d'oublier," unable to do anything but serve their king, defend their estates, and produce a line which would end with Vigny himself. He, on the other hand, was childless. Still, his name as a poet would live on: Seul et dernier anneau de deux chaînes brisées, J e reste. E t je soutiens encor dans les hauteurs, Parmi les maîtres purs de nos savants musées, L'IDÉAL du poète et des graves penseurs. J'éprouve sa durée en vingt ans de silence,

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ICARUS Et toujours, d'âge en âge, encor, je vois la France Contempler mes tableaux et leur jeter des fleurs.41 There is a suggestion of bitterness in Vigny's pose as the last frail representative of his race; it is more than balanced by his celebration of the mind, which assumed the status of a divinity for him, and by his conviction that posterity would think of him with respect: Puissent mes destinées* Vous amener à moi, de dix en dix années, Attentifs à mon œuvre, et pour moi c'est assez! 42 4— It is possible to regard the career of Alfred de Vigny in two ways, to read the progression of his thought as an illustration of either of two images. One is the image of the poet created by the Parnassians. In a poem addressed to Vigny, Léon Dierx crystallized this ideal image. 43 The poet, he wrote, fixes the sights and sounds of the world in the clear metal of his art. H e recognizes the impossibility of contact with God, the ignobility of nature, the vanity of glory and of love. Through it all, he fixes his gaze on the altar of the ideal. Il est stoïque. Il suit de haut sa destinée. Et dans la solitude où sa grande âme est née, Sous la secrète armure et le secret flambeau, Il sera le plus fier des chevaliers du beau. The poet devotes himself to the preservation of the ideal, in spite of his isolation, in spite of man's isolation in a hostile universe. And he does not weep. Leconte de Lisle, in " L a Mort de Valmiki," 4 4 wrote the Parnassian equivalent to "Moïse." f * T h e word "destinées" is a pun: Les Destinées was one of the titles Vigny considered giving to his volume of philosophical poems. t T h e legend on which Leconte de Lisle based his poem occurs in the Mahabharata. T h e subject is actually the death of the sage Tchyavana. Characteristically, Leconte de Lisle substituted the legendary poet Valmiki, the Indian Homer, for the sage. 1 4 8

Alfred de Vigny Valmiki, like Moses, is aged and tired of life. He too climbs to a mountaintop to die. But, while Moses begs God to grant an end to his life, laments the curse of genius which has made it impossible for him to find happiness, Valmiki remains silent. Impassive, he contemplates the landscape which he has preserved in the Ramayana. He "forgets the man in himself": "L'esprit ne sait plus rien des sens ni de soi-même." While his body is devoured by a horde of white ants, his spirit passes into eternity, preserved from death by the art he has created. This was the image Vigny had of himself, the image of the pure poet, above the crowd, refusing to weep, content with having served the cause of beauty and with passing his name on to posterity. It was this image of Vigny that the Parnassians accepted, an incarnation of their own concepts of the true artist. In spite of the admirable nature of this ideal, it was somewhat inhuman: after the Promethean activity idealized by Hugo and Balzac, by the Romantics of the eighteen-thirties, the Parnassian ideal, the ideal of Vigny, represented an admission of failure. It is this admission of failure that dictates the other way in which we may interpret Vigny's thought. Were one to accept Auden's notions about the sources of cancer — that it is caused by "will its negative inversion," the burning out of the self by a portion of the self that has been denied creative expression — one might see in Vigny the living image of Auden's selfdestroyer. Vigny's refusal to weep was also a refusal to speak to his public, a refusal to write; his disdain for the turbulence of action was a disdain for life itself. The Goncourts, judging the nineteenth century through the mouth of the weird theorist Chassagnol, wrote that their age was "a Prometheus on the rocks, but a Prometheus just the same . . . a Titan, if you prefer, with liver trouble . . ." 45 It is ironic that Vigny, while he was dying of cancer, should compare himself to Prometheus, gnawed by the terrible vulture.48 1

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ICARUS Yet was he Prometheus? or was he Icarus, the true archetype for the conception — and the failure — of super-human aims? In spite of his disclaimers, Vigny's image of the poet during the eighteen-twenties and even the eighteen-thirties, was that common to Romanticism, the image of the titanic will shaping and guiding the world. But he was, like his hero Julian, an apostate: he abjured the Romantic ethic and retired into the Ivory Tower of art and philosophy, an Ivory Tower which was also a sort of sepulchre, a palace of art which was also a prison of self. He was an Icarus who turned back in mid-flight. In Vigny's thought, in the stages of his career, can be seen the decline of the early Romantic ethic: while Hugo and Balzac dreamed of an unlimited manifestation of self, Vigny devoted his life to the preservation of that self in a universe over which the will had no dominion, in which the self was a superfluous and isolated entity.

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Chapter V

Gustave Flaubert: The Artist as Raging Saint Discussing the state of French literature in a letter to Louise Colet in 1854, Gustave Flaubert described the discipline he had established for himself. His intellectual activity, he wrote, would consist in "the ironic acceptance of life and a thorough plastic remodeling of it through Art." And, he continued, "as for us, living is none of our business-, we must only try not to suffer." This attitude was clearly similar to Vigny's stoic retirement into the Ivory Tower of art and concentration, but Flaubert brought to its realization a violence completely alien to Vigny. He could indeed assume a stance of stoic impassibility: "I give back to humanity what it gives me: indifference." But he immediately undercut this pose of haughty disdain with a vulgar and violent interjection: " V a te faire foutre, troupeau; I don't belong in the sheepfold!" He characterized himself as " G . F. Superior Man" and "Gustavus Flaubertus, Bourgeoisophobus" and — sounding much like his own M. Homais— G. Flaubert, Friend to Franklin and to Marat, first-rate sedition-monger and anarchist, and disorganiser of despotism in both hemispheres for the last twenty years!!! I 5 1

ICARUS Flaubert's violence and his grotesque wit may be partially understood in the light of the intellectual climate of France during the eighteen-thirties, the period in which the Bourgeoisophobe produced his first pieces of literature.1 Two strains of the Romantic ethic of that period seem to have influenced the young Flaubert. One was the mal du siècle, that modern taedium vitae inherited from Werther, René, and Childe Harold, developed by Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, Musset, and other sad young men of the nineteenth century. If we are to believe a letter Flaubert wrote to his schoolfellow Ernest Chevalier in 1834, he was so tired of living that he had considered suicide before he was thirteen.2 The first of his literary efforts that have been preserved is an anecdote entitled "Voyage en enfer," in which Satan reveals to the author the panorama of human vice and suffering. The piece concludes with a few lines of dialogue: — Will you show me your kingdom? I asked Satan. — There it is! — W h a t do you mean? A n d Satan answered: — T h e world, you see, is hell.3

Flaubert never lost the conviction that the world was Hell; he never abjured the reaction he expressed in his adolescence, an attitude of disillusionment, disenchantment, and despair. The languorous melancholy of the mal du siècle was complemented, however, by a much more violent stance, the revolutionary satanism of frenetic Romanticism. It was not really a desire for political revolution, although some of the young Romantics did dabble in politics. Gautier carefully chose a slightly bluish red for his famous vest, "for we wanted no one to attribute to us any political intention." It was rather the revolutionary call of art itself, which brought with it the pseudo-Byronism and the anti-bourgeois attitude of the Jeunesi 52

Gustave Flaubert France. The apprentice poets and painters of the early eighteen-thirties devoted themselves body and soul to the defense and illustration of the arts. Petrus Borel wrote of art, his one master: — I l est jaloux, tyran, et veut alors qu'on l'aime, Qu'on l'aime seul, entier, qu'on se vende soi-même A lui seul, corps et âme, ainsi qu'à Belzébut U n sorcier vend sa vie ou la donne en tribut.

The cult of art, as it was practiced by the Jeunes-France, was not Vigny's Apollonian Atticism; it was a Dionysiac ritual in which the faithful gathered together to smoke Spanish cigarettes, drink a flaming punch from skulls, and read their demonic verses.* That the life of these corybantes was an absurd attempt to imitate literary clichés was amply demonstrated by Gautier's satirical tales, Les Jeunes-France. Still they did have a sense of devotion. "You say that they were absurd," wrote Philothée O'Neddy, one of the original Jeunes-France, in 1875. "The word is applicable only to fools. For madmen, one has to be satisfied with the word laughable. 'Sdeath! our adversaries, the bourgeois and the reckoners, were absurd! " 4 Flaubert, as the bas-Romantisme of his early works reveals, shared the attitude if not the life of the Jeunes-France. He wrote to Louise Colet in 1852 that he and his boyhood friends lived in a hothouse atmosphere of poetry which merely made the boredom of their lives more unbearable. In 1870 he recalled the same period, in the preface he wrote for the posthumous publication of Bouilhet's Dernières Chansons-. ". . . what hatred of every cliché! what surges toward the sublime! what respect for the masters! how we admired Victor Hugo! " * T h e best description of the Jeunes-France at work or play is Philothée O'Neddy's lurid Feu et flamme. Interestingly enough, in the early drafts of Madame Bovary (the Ur-Bovary constructed by Jean Pommier and G a brielle Leleu1), Charles Bovary indulged in the same sort of thing during his schooldays: " H e disordered himself completely."

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ICARUS He shared the devotion to art and the concomitant tenet, the hatred of the bourgeoisie. Once again, Flaubert's attitude differed from Vigny's. While Vigny's disdain was that of the aristocrat for the ignoble, Flaubert's was distinctly the scorn of the artist — one should say, of the rapin, the joke-loving studio apprentice * — for the bourgeois, the Spicier, the philistin.5 It was the curious mixture of these two strains that produced Flaubert's attitude and that shaped his image of the ideal artist. Flaubert oscillated between the disabused irony of the man in the Ivory Tower and the grotesque violence of the Jeunes-France and their descendants, the Bohemians. He combined in a single movement Vigny's discreet retirement and the offensive tactics of Petrus Borel and Philothée O'Neddy. He wrote, for example, to Ernest Chevalier in 1842, a bitter complaint concerning his routine as a law student and the vanity of worldly success; he outlined the life he would like to lead: . . . let's stay at home; from our balcony, let's watch the public pass, and if we ever get too bored, well, let's spit on their heads, and then let's continue our tranquil chat, while gazing at the setting sun on the horizon.® Flaubert would have recognized a kindred spirit in the Stephen Dedalus who could recite "A Pisgah Sight of Palestine, or the Parable of the Plums," in which the same combination of retreat and attack is recommended. Yet Flaubert himself recognized the more respectable component of his attitude. It was this component, the disabused stoic retirement into the Ivory Tower, that he celebrated in * T h e rapin made his first appearance in 1791, in Fabre d'Églantine's comedy, L'Intrigue épistolaire. H e reappeared in various guises in the Comedie humaine, as Pierre Grassou, Joseph Bridau, and especially Mistigris in Un Début dans la vie. Murger in various novels, Champfleury in Les Aventures de Mademoiselle Mariette, and the Goncourts in Manette Salomon, gave extensive treatment to the rapin.

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Gustave Flaubert his first description of the artist as ideal type, in L'Éducation sentimentale of 1845. In his first novel Flaubert wrote, as have so many apprentice novelists after him, a Bildungsroman of which the elements were extracted from his own life. But, at a moment when the Bildungsroman still recorded more often than not the education of a dandy, Flaubert made of the first Éducation sentimentale a Kunstlerroman, a portrait of the artist as a young man. The life of Jules is rather Flaubert's spiritual autobiography than a narration of the external events of his life. Jules is a sort of ideal emanation of Flaubert's thought and character, a writer who is all that the twenty-four-year-old Flaubert thought an artist should be. Jules, the artist, is not the only protagonist of the novel; indeed through the bulk of the work he is eclipsed by his schoolfellow Henry Gosselin. The two heroes are opposites: if Flaubert shaped Jules as a portrait of the artist, he saw in Henry's development — to borrow Sartre's ironic title — "l'enfance d'un chef," the sentimental and moral education of a pillar of bourgeois society. What irony there is in the novel is directed at Henry. Flaubert did not share Balzac's halfgrudging admiration for the financially astute, socially successful Rastignacs and du Tillets, for the solidly established Ernest Chevaliers, the decorated Maxime Du Camps. He led Henry from the provinces to Paris, through a first affair, and to the dubious estate of the unscrupulous, hypocritical man of action, satisfied in love and blessed with a promising political career: "There he stands, almost wealthy and already famous; in less than four or five years he will be a delegate, and once he has become a delegate, where will he ever stop?"7 What is for Henry a happy ending was for Flaubert an example of bourgeois stupidity and depravity.

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ICARUS Flaubert poured all his sympathy into his portrait of Jules, who rejects the life of conventional success pursued by Henry. When his family forces him to study for the notariate, Jules reacts with the artist's horror of practical life: ". . . think of me in an office, me a desk-clerk, me writing out figures . . . and that for the rest of my life, or rather until I die of it, for I shall die of it, in rage and humiliation." His dreams are those of all the young Icarian heroes of Romanticism, love and glory — literary glory which he hopes to win with the production of his verse melodrama, Le Chevalier de Calatrava. If he has a dream that was particular to Flaubert, it is that of an idealized homosexuality, a close friendship with a man as interested in art as he is. This vision of the artist's life was a continual one for Flaubert. He had written to Ernest Chevalier, in 1832, with great passion and little syntax: . . . a so to speak fraternal love unites us. Yes I who really have deep feelings I would walk a thousand leagues if I had to to join my best friend, for nothing is as sweet as friendship oh sweet friendship how much has been accomplished through this feeling, without intimacy how could w e live?

The friendships with Alfred Le Poittevin (which struck Flaubert as a realization of the ideal relationship portrayed in Louis Lambert), with Maxime Du Camp, with Louis Bouilhet, were his attempts to actualize the dream. At times, it was the desire for a cénacle, "a little cénacle of good fellows, all artists, living together and meeting two or three times a week to eat a tasty morsel, washed down with a good wine, while sampling some succulent poet," which found realization in the dîners Magny and the dîner des auteurs sifflés. In L'Éducation sentimentale of 1869 Flaubert would treat the idea with a bitter irony; in Bouvard et Pécuchet he would present a grotesque caricature of it. In his first novel, however, he treated the dream sympathetically; it was his rejection of Henry that took 156

Gustave Flaubert the sting out of the ultimate incompatibility of his two protagonists.8 Even in the first pages of the novel, Jules is somewhat disenchanted. His dull existence as a notary's clerk makes him regret his dreams of love and glory: "Oh my dreams! . . . What do you say to that? Here I am bemoaning my dreams, and I'm not even twenty; what will it be like when I'm thirty, or when my hair has all turned white?" Jules shares what might be called the "agèd eagle" syndrome, the feeling that one is some decades older than one actually is, a form of the mal du siècle that has long outlasted the nineteenth century. Flaubert's earlier heroes possessed the same feeling that they were worn out at twenty. The narrator of Mémoires d'un fou (1838) writes: T h e y tell me to start living again, to mingle with the crowd! . . . H o w can the broken branch flower anew? And why, so young, am I so bitter? H o w can I tell? Perhaps my destiny is to blame for what I am, worn out before having borne a burden, breathless before having run.

The narrator of Novembre ( 1842 ) utters the same lament: If one counts the years . . . it isn't long since I was born, but m y many memories weigh me down, as old men are bowed down by all the days they have lived; it sometimes seems to me that I have lived for centuries and that my being contains the debris of a thousand former lives. W h y should this be?

The obvious answer is that he, like so many Romantics, was suffering from the curse of sensibility and the curse of genius. In the first Éducation sentimentale, Flaubert compared the suffering of the artist to that of the goose which is nailed to a board and overfed so that its liver will become delicate: "The animal had to be eaten, the poet had to speak; so much the better then that they suffered in their very innards, if the flesh of the former is exquisite, and the latter's phrases are savory."

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ICARUS Some few years later, he suggested that suffering and thinking may well be the same activity, that genius may be only a refined perception of pain. Jules must suffer, must be disenchanted, because such suffering is the artist's sentimental education.9 The crucial event in Jules's life is the moment at which his dreams, about to be realized, are completely destroyed. Having made the acquaintance of a troupe of actors on tour, Jules emulates Wilhelm Meister's acceptance of the carefree life of such traveling players. He envisions the glory he will win from their production of his play; he sees his dream of love realized in the little favors of an actress, Mademoiselle Lucinde. But the troupe decamps before the play is produced, and Jules learns that his beloved Lucinde is the mistress of the impresario Bernardi. The young artist is plunged into bitterness: "Love having failed him, he denied love; since it was because of poetry that he had been deceived, he gave it up, believing it a lie." He rereads René, Werther and Byron; his sorrow, confused with theirs, becomes precious to him. What saves him from too much self-pity is his gift of ironic self-analysis. He begins to regard life as a subject for study rather than as a source of feeling: ". . . he studied in himself and in others the complicated organism of the passions and of ideas; he scrutinized himself pitilessly, dissected himself as if he were a cadaver . . . " Jules's retirement is a retreat from naive immediacy into the Ivory Tower of his own ironic analysis. He succeeds in escaping from his hyper-sensitivity: ". . . everything fled before the flagellation of his irony, a terrible irony which began with himself." The reader must be prepared to take Jules's development on faith; Flaubert seems to have been too much impressed by "this superhuman stoicism" to have dramatized it very explicitly. In this respect, it must be admitted that Jules represents Flaubert's aspirations rather than his realized aims. In 1846 Flaubert lamented his lack of stoi158

Gustave Flaubert cism. The ancients, he remarked, did not suffer from nervous disorders. And the following year he still yearned for Jules's strength: "I am neither chaste nor strong, but weak and pliable: the tiniest thing moves me. Why can't I be insensitive instead?" The aesthetic of the first Éducation sentimentale is no less distinct from Jules's attitude. While Flaubert described Henry in the third person, and with a certain irony, he cast a third of Jules's development in the first person, in a series of letters written to Henry. Irony is completely lacking in his treatment of Jules. It was not for some years, not until 1849, that Flaubert would feel himself partially cured of "the cancer of lyricism." 10 Having forgotten the man in himself, Jules witnesses an epiphany which is the revelation of his vocation. He realizes that his suffering has meaning, that there is a harmony in the workings of the mind: . . . Nature participated in this harmony, and the whole world appeared to him, reproducing infinity and reflecting the face of God; art drew all these lines, sang all these sounds, sculpted all these forms, grasped their respective proportions, and by mysterious ways led them to that Beauty more beautiful than beauty itself, since it proceeds from the ideal which is the source of earthly beauty. It produces in us admiration, the prayer of our mind in the presence of the brilliant manifestation of infinite mind, the hymn our mind sings in its joy at the realization that it is of the same ideal nature, the incense our mind burns to the ideal as a pledge of its love.11 The narrator of Mémoires d'un fou had already found in art the one possible spiritualism, the one possible religion.12 Jules turns to the study of literature, the study of style. He realizes the infinite extent of art's province, the possibility of painting the nineteenth century as well as the Middle Ages or antiquity. He studies in Paris at the Sorbonne, mingles with society. As a result, he perceives first the comic elements in modern life,

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ICARUS next the profound differences of opinion and temperament between him and the mass of men. Having met Henry again, he abandons him, rejects through him the search for pleasure and power, turns to a life of sobriety and chastity, relieved only by his dreams of love and pleasure. Though poor in worldly terms, he is rich and powerful in his mind, in his love of art and beauty. His entire life is focused on his art: "He has become a grave and great artist, whose patience is never exhausted and whose faith in the ideal is without interruption . . . " 1 3 He is truly a "superior man," isolated, disenchanted, ironic, and an absolute artist. He has become Daedalus the fabulous artificer and has renounced the absurd Icarian flights of his youth. Jules's final position is the ideal to which Flaubert aspired during the rest of his life. It is interesting to contrast the ideal incarnated in Jules with the hero of L'Éducation sentimentale of 1869, Frédéric Moreau. In a sense, Jules is Flaubert's Daniel d'Arthez, Frédéric his Lucien de Rubempré, the ideal and the deviation from the ideal. While Balzac was able to see dArthez and Lucien in direct opposition, however, Flaubert created Jules and Frédéric through two completely different registers of vision and tone. Jules, the ideal, was presented lyrically and sentimentally; Frédéric was described ironically and impassively. Jules belongs to Flaubert's youthful period of Romantic expansiveness, Frédéric to his mature, "realistic" manner. T o a degree they are essentially the same: both are men of feeling, both dream of an ideal mistress and literary glory. They share the same experience, the collapse of their dreams and the bankruptcy of sensibility. Beyond this point they differ completely. Jules retires from life, into the Ivory Tower of art and concentration; Frédéric continues to dabble in life. He flirts with poetry, painting, music; he touches on love, on politics, and on business. He is in everything he does, as in the revolution of 1848, a passer-by and a mere spectator. He is, as

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Gustave Flaubert he points out, "one of the disinherited"; but Flaubert does not permit him to do more than pose as el Desdichado. The "nervous feminine nature" which Jules is able to restrain with ironic self-analysis proceeds unhindered in Frédéric. He is "a man with every weakness," blown in any direction by unfavorable winds. He is a proto-Prufrock, "immobilized by the fear of failure." What he lacks is the will and the patience which permit Jules to lose the world and to save his own soul in art. Frédéric loses the world and his soul as well: ". . . he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart." But Frédéric is only partially a caricature of an artist, as Albert Thibaudet has called him. The two true artists in the second Education sentimentale are the failure Pellerin and the charlatan Delmar: in them, Flaubert attacked the Romantic pretensions to political power, supporting his attack with the claim that the business of government should be a positive science. Nor is Frédéric a solitary failure: the universe of the Education sentimentale of 1869 is a rotten universe, in which every man is a failure. Both the artist and the man of action are successful, each in his own terms, in the novel of 1845. In the later novel, Deslauriers is as much a failure as Frédéric. Flaubert dissected and destroyed the dream of power as brutally as he did the dream of love and beauty. The first Education sentimentale is a Bildungsroman, the second, a novel of deterioration. The moral of the novel is spoken early by Frédéric: "We take refuge in the mediocre, despairing of the beauty that we have dreamed."14 Who was the model for Frédéric? The question is an unanswerable one. Flaubert may have dramatized in him the sides of his own character he least admired. It was Flaubert who wrote to Louise Colet: "I should like to have neither a body nor a heart, or rather, I should like to be dead, for the impression I make on this world is really too ridiculous. That's what makes me defiant and shy of myself." But it was Alfred

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ICARUS Le Poittevin who wrote to Flaubert: "I could have accomplished something, if I had succeeded in being an artist. What I have always lacked is imll." Behind Frédéric stand SainteBeuve's sensual Amaury and, perhaps, Charles de Bernard's mediocre Victor Deslandes, the unheroic hero of Les Ailes d'Icare* Flaubert himself wrote that Maxime Du Camp's novel of failure and ennui, Les Forces perdues, presented a just idea of the men of his generation, the very idea he was trying to convey in L'Éducation sentimentale. It is safest to see Frédéric as a deviation from Flaubert's ideal image of the artist — a man of feeling with no will, no patience, no ability for ironic self-analysis: "too much sensuality — no logic in his ideas — too many daydreams have kept him from being an artist." He is an Icarus who contents himself with nostalgic reminiscences of the heights he once hoped to attain. He is, perhaps, what Flaubert might have been had he not followed Jules into the sanctuary of repose and purification that was his life in art.15 The program to which Flaubert devoted himself after his return from his Mediterranean tour was the realization of Jules's existence, which he axiomized in 1854, the ironic acceptance of life and the transformation of life through art. It is not in his later novels that one must look for a complete description of his life. Flaubert's period of lyric expansion was over, he refused to s'écrire™ Yet he was a human being, not a thinking stone: he wrote what amounts to some thirteen * It is, naturally enough, critics of Bernard who tend to regard Les Ailes d'Icare as one possible source of L'Éducation sentimentale: see Jan Sjirk V a n Der W a l , Charles de Bernard (Purmurend, 1950), pp. 2 1 0 - 2 1 1 ; Pierre Moreau, "L'Énigme de Charles de Bernard," Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, L (1950), 48. T h e plot of L'Éducation sentimentale does resemble that of Volupté somewhat more than it does the plot of Les Ailes d'Icare; but there are decided similarities. Curiously enough, James devoted an article — or two articles published under a single rubric — now in French Poets and Novelists to Flaubert and Bernard.

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Gustave Flaubert volumes of letters in which he had an outlet for the personality he tried so hard to conceal in his fiction. What Flaubert's correspondence contains is an aesthetic that is at the same time an ethic, the discipline to which the perfect artist, according to Flaubert's definition of this ideal, should conform. From time to time, Flaubert expressed doubts concerning the validity of his way of life. Like Mann's Tonio Kroger, he saw himself as ein verirrter Burger, a bourgeois manqué. After one particularly pleasant afternoon spent in bourgeois society — a family gathering in honor of the coming marriage of Achille Flaubert's daughter, the novelist's niece — Flaubert asked the crucial question: if such a life were offered to him, would he accept? His own answer to the question was usually no. "The artist, in my opinion," he wrote to his mother, "is a monstrosity, something outside of nature. All the misfortunes that Providence loads on him come from his stubborn denial of that axiom." He advised Guy de Maupassant that any man who chooses to be an artist forfeits the right to live as other men do. He wrote to Louise Colet: "Poésie oblige."17 His attitude was in the first place a stance of self-defense. He was convinced that the experiences he lived through in his youth were crushing blows, and he described himself as a great "Doctor of Melancholy." He wrote to Alfred Le Poittevin in 1845, to Louise Colet and to Emmanuel Vasse in 1846, to Madame Gustave de Maupassant in 1873, that the surest defense against unhappiness is an armor of art and pride. His recommendations differed from those of Rousseau and Chateaubriand in that art replaced for him the contemplation of nature. Flaubert was aware of the practical inconvenience of his opinions: "You get paid in one of two ways: either with pride or with money; you have to choose." He chose pride and the pleasures of art itself. His refusal to publish until 1856 may have been caused to some degree by a fear of failure; it was as well a refusal to please an audience. Molière may have 163

ICARUS written that the great rule is to please; Flaubert countered by saying, "I aim at more, at pleasing myself." He praised the ebullience of Alexandre Dumas père, but deplored his "shameful popularity." 18 The flight from popularity was at the same time a flight from life. In the eighteen-thirties, the adolescent Flaubert had thought that the world was in the hands of the Devil. The mature Flaubert was less melodramatic, but no less disenchanted with life. "Everything connected with life repels me," he wrote to Louise Colet in 1846; "everything that drags me to it and plunges me in it terrifies me. I wish I had never been born, I wish I were dead." He wrote to her some years later that he had considered entering a monastery, had thought of castrating himself. Such fears and such considerations may perhaps be traced to the nervous disorder that was the curse of Flaubert's life; but they were also the fears and considerations of his entire generation, of the Leconte de Lisles, the Goncourts, the Baudelaires. For all of them, the flight from life led to life in art. Flaubert wrote in 1859, "so as not to live, I plunge into Art, like a desperate man; I get drunk on ink as others get drunk on wine." 19 Associated with the retreat from life was a retreat from self: "The wine of Art causes a lasting inebriation, and it is inexhaustible. It's thinking of one's self that makes one unhappy." Only in the practice of literature could Flaubert forget "his wretched self." He also succeeded in establishing a sort of dissociation of sensibility. He maintained that an artist must divide his life into two parts: "live like a bourgeois and think like a demi-god. The satisfactions of the body and those of the mind have nothing in common." If one considers the ethical aspect of this conviction, one finds in it Flaubert's refusal to waste himself, to direct his genius into his life rather than into his art. His scorn for Alfred de Musset was limitless. "Alcohol," he wrote to Louise Colet, who had been Musset's

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Gustave Flaubert mistress before she was his, "alcohol doesn't preserve brains as it does foetuses." He described himself at the same period as a bourgeois living a quiet life in the country, asking neither for special attention nor for special favors, interested in nothing but literature itself. This ethical rejection of the Romantic identification of genius and disorder was complemented by the rejection of the Romantic aesthetic of mutual feeling. Flaubert dismissed as nonsense such theories as Lamartine's: " Y o u don't write with your heart, but with your head . . ." He concurred in the pride that inspired Leconte de Lisle's "Les Montreurs," the refusal to amuse the public with the pageant of his own bleeding heart. He even sustained the opinion that the less an artist feels something, the more apt he is to express himself accurately. Art, he maintained, was not "an outlet for passion, like a chamber pot a little cleaner than a simple chat or a confidence." Yet at the same time, he was somewhat afraid of rejecting immediacy and lyric expansiveness. As early as 1846 he wrote to Louise Colet that he was afraid of becoming emotionally arid and egoistic: he was aware of changes in himself that he could not explain. And in 1854 he informed Louis Bouilhet of the judgment his mother had rendered: "The mania for phrases has dried up your heart." 20 In spite of such periodic fears and doubts, he was convinced that he had chosen the right way: " . . . I wouldn't exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am performing my duty, that I am obeying a higher destiny, that I am doing what is Good, that I am on the side of Right." He accepted art as an escape from life, the richness of the imagination as a consolation for the flatness of his bourgeois existence: That's why I love Art. At least there, in that world of fictions, everything is free. There you appease everything, there you do everything, you are at the same time king and subject, active and passive, victim and priest. No limits . . .

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ICARUS He accepted the image of the Ivory Tower as a symbol for his way of life, and, while he sometimes regarded his life in art as a poor consolation, like Vigny he disdained the descent to active life: "When a man devoted to style lowers himself to action, he falls and should be punished." The life of the mind became for Flaubert the only life there was: " . . . a book is for me a special way of life." His participation was in the lives and passions of his characters.21 His curious relationship with Louise Colet, Flaubert's parody of a Muse, expressed itself in one long recommendation that she devote herself completely to art. Flaubert always wrote art with a capital A, and, in spite of infrequent denials, he believed in it as in an absolute. The letters to Louise Colet were literally an attempt at conversion. As early as 1835, Flaubert had regarded art as a sort of religion: . . let us always concern ourselves with Art, which, greater than peoples, crowns, and kings, is always there, suspended in enthusiasm, with its divine diadem." He described to Louise Colet the life of the perfect artists of the past, men who lived only to give expression to beauty, artists who were in fact vessels of God. When he noted in 1852 that he was turning toward a sort of aesthetic mysticism, it was a realization that came long after the event. He came to envision a "communion of souls" through the book: "A book creates for you an eternal family in humanity. All those who will live from your thought are like children seated at your table." He felt a spiritual bond with all the authors who preceded him in time.22 Flaubert's cult of art was, like that of the Jeunes-France, a demanding and violent religion. Babbitt was not the first to point out that Flaubert identified religion and fanaticism. Flaubert himself wrote that fanaticism is religion, and that a fanatic belief in art is necessary to the artist. Both his artistic ethic and his aesthetic contained recommendations of selfdenial, both figurative and literal humiliation of the flesh: his 166

Gustave Flaubert vocation was that of the penitente. Poetry, for the adolescent Flaubert, was a passionate cry: what was beauty, he asked, if not the impossible? what was poetry if not an expression of barbarity, of the heart of man? In the eighteen-forties he began to distrust the excesses of the Romantic imagination, of "inspiration": You must distrust everything that resembles inspiration; what you feel is often only a preconceived notion, an artificial exaltation which you consciously arouse in yourself and which has not come voluntarily. Besides, you don't live in the state of inspiration. Pegasus walks more often than he gallops. Buffon may well have been right, Flaubert suggested, when he wrote that genius is only a long patience. The artist must learn the techniques of his art. The practical result of these new opinions was the writing of Madame Bovary, the first stage in Flaubert's vocation. The Correspondance bears witness to the efforts Flaubert made to accept the discipline he had imposed on himself. " A vocation followed patiently and naively," he wrote to Louise Colet in 1853, "almost becomes a physical function, a way of living that embraces the personality as a whole." He undertook the artist's vocation with a sense of religious awe. "Our aspirations make us worthier than do our works," he wrote in 1858; and in 1878, he crystallized his religious attitude in a letter to his niece Caroline: "It's not a matter of succeeding, but of perfecting one's self." Like his hero Jules, Flaubert was willing to lose the whole world to save his own soul.23 It is in the letters Flaubert wrote in the early eighteen-fifties, while he was engaged in the creation of Madame Bovary, that one finds the record of his discipline of self-denial. He had accepted the task of writing a novel of modern life to cure himself of that "cancer of lyricism" which had produced the first and extravagant Tentation de Saint Antoine. He never 1 67

ICARUS tired of repeating that he was attempting the impossible: "Good or bad, this book will have been for me a prodigious tour de force: that's how far the composition, the characters, and the immediate effect are from my natural manner." What was natural for him was "the unnatural for others, the extraordinary, the fantastic, the shriek of metaphysics and mythology." Madame Bovary was to be a masterpiece of selfdenial, a rigorously impersonal work of art: ". . . no lyricism, no reflections, the personality of the author absent." According to this new aesthetic, the artist had to create works which would lead posterity to think that he had never even lived. The flight from life that lay at the source of Parnassianism culminated for Flaubert, as for the other members of his generation, in this recommendation of a "meta-personal" literature. He conceived a work that would be pure style, pure art; the artist would be a god, invisible behind his universe. While Lamartine compared himself to the facile Aeolian harp, Flaubert said that he was like a man trying to play the piano with lumps of lead attached to his fingers. He denied the Hugolian concept of the natural growth of the work of art and rejected the common Romantic analogy of literary creation and childbirth: ". . . books aren't made like children, but like pyramids, with a blueprint, with big blocks piled one on top of the other; it takes muscles, time, and sweat . . ." And he clearly regarded his efforts as those of a penitent humiliating himself before his God. He later defined literature as the art of sacrifices, said that the one principle an artist should follow was simply to sacrifice everything to art. He compared himself to an Amazon, who burned off one breast in order to handle a bow; and he invited Louise Colet to join him in the ritual of self-laceration: "Art, like the God of the Jews, feeds on holocausts. Go ahead! tear at your flesh, whip yourself, roll in ashes, debase your flesh, spit on your body, rip out your heart!" This life of devotion was the one he had chosen for i 68

Gustave Flaubert himself; it was the discipline he recommended for the perfect artist. He compared his retired existence to that of an Arab in the desert, and, more appropriately, to that of a monk, an existence composed of "immobility, solitude, and obscurity." 24 But it should be apparent how much Flaubert's attitude differed from that of Vigny. T h e author of Chatterton, disenchanted and despairing, withdrew into an atmosphere of stoic calm and ironic disdain. Flaubert carried with him a quality in which V i g n y seems to have been remarkably lacking: that quality was a frenetic rage.

3 T h e term with which Flaubert most often characterized himself was ours. He first described himself as a bear in 1841, in a letter to Ernest Chevalier: Flaubert intended to make no N e w Year's visits, to live according to the stoic maxim "Live in seclusion and forbear." * T h e bourgeois retaliated, he said, b y considering him eccentric, immoral, a veritable "bear." Whether or not the term was of his own invention, Flaubert accepted it with delight. H e saw himself as a stoic in a bearskin — or, perhaps, as a bear masquerading in the guise of a stoic. He joked in 1845 about buying a painting of a bear and labeling it Portrait of Gustave Flaubert. H e even signed one of his last letters to his niece " T h e Grizzly Bear, A n d for you, Nanny," mixing his characteristic pose with the tenderness he so rarely demonstrated to anyone but her. But he was lying when he wrote in 1858 that "a bear is not more solitary and a god is no more calm" than he was. Solitary he may have been; calm he never attained.25 Flaubert's retreat was not Vigny's retirement into the peace of stoic disdain, nor was it the retreat of the defeated and the outcast recommended b y Rousseau and Chateaubriand. It was * This execrable pun exists in my English translation, not in Flaubert's French.

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ICARUS first a retreat that was conceived as an insult to the bourgeois Flaubert detested, next a withdrawal for purification. This latter motive is apparent in Flaubert's emphasis on the penitential discipline: he plunged into art to escape from his own nervous irritability, to cleanse himself of Romantic excesses and the effusions of lyricism. The vocation involved endless suffering. Even while collaborating with Maxime Du Camp on the rhapsodic Par les champs et par les grèves, which belonged to his period of Romantic lyricism, Flaubert complained bitterly about the difficulties of style: "Style, which is something that I take to heart, grates horribly on my nerves. I am tormented, I eat my heart out. There are days when I am sick of it, and at night it makes me feverish. The farther I go, the more I find myself unable to express the Idea." When he turned to the more restrictive discipline of Madame Bovary, his suffering became still worse. "Oh! Art! Art!" he cried in a letter to Louise Colet, "What is this chimaera which gnaws at our hearts, and why?" He held firm, he wrote, with nothing to sustain himself but "the ferocity of an uncontrollable whim." The phrase which was for Flaubert a constant refrain, a lifelong lament, was: "Oh! I shall have known the throes of Art [les affres de l'Art] ! " 26 What Flaubert did was to identify the Romantic stereotype of the martyred poet with his own sense of art as a religious vocation, a monastic discipline. When he wrote that the history of the arts was a martyrology, he was referring rather to his own sensation of the tortures of creation than to the lamentable destinies of Tasso, Chatterton, and Gilbert. He accepted the martyrdom of art as the one way to spiritual salvation: ". . . one goes to heaven only through martyrdom. One ascends with a crown of thorns, a transfixed heart, bloody hands, and a radiant face." His one condescension to the usual Romantic stereotype occurred when he identified the artist with the gladiator, who had to amuse the public, even at the I 7o

Gustave Flaubert cost of his own life. He even accepted the condemnation of Madame Bovary, to some degree: he jokingly wrote in 1857 that he intended to have his portrait painted — in the guise of Delacroix's Tasso — in irons, seated on the damp straw of a dungeon cell.27 For Flaubert, like Leconte de Lisle, welcomed any form of martyrdom. He loved the ascetic discipline of writing Madame Bovary: "I love my work with a frenetic and perverted love, as an ascetic loves the hairshirt that scratches his belly." Any definitive explanation of this love must fall within the realm of psychoanalysis, but it is surely permissible to suggest an explanation. Claude Vigee has called the ethic of Parnassianism "the penitential obsession," a thankless renunciation of life which became an end in itself, a variety of narcissism which grew as a reaction to the Romantic diffusion of the personality. The key word is, perhaps, narcissism. While Hugo considered the relationship of the poet and his muse a sexual one, while Balzac saw in the creative act a manifestation of masculinity, while even Vigny thought of the visit of the muse of contemplation as a sensual pleasure, Flaubert, in a few illuminating instances, characterized the creative process as masturbation. He compared the state of approaching inspiration to that of "a fouteur feeling his sperm rising in preparation for an emission." In his own case, the spiritual equivalent of orgasm had to be prepared: "The erections of thought are like those of the body; they don't come when you will them!" He wrote, when first thinking of Salammbo: ". . . it's not that I'm in the least inspired, but I want to see it, it's a sort of curiosity, what you might call a wanton desire without an erection." Over a year later he began to take some pleasure in the writing of the novel: "The erection has finally arrived, monsieur, as a result of my whipping and manustirpating myself."* Flaubert's eccentricities were matched by his * "Manustirpating" is not a dirty word, but it is a dubious one, which I

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ICARUS vulgarity and violence: "Let's masturbate old art down to the bone!" But he could convey some sense of pathos with the same image: . . by masturbating my poor mind, will I perhaps manage to make something squirt out of it?" It would be dangerous to go as far as did Léon Daudet, to consider Flaubert an eternal adolescent with "the solitary and unwholesome aspirations of puberty." One can merely note Flaubert's life-long desire to please only himself, to find solitary pleasure in the pursuit of art. One can further point out that Flaubert's attitude encompasses the classic associations of masturbation with, on the one hand, self-distrust and self-reproach — he was not sure he was a saint, or an idiot and a dog — and, on the other, a delight in cruelty to others. Yet here, as often, the image of Icarus eclipses that of Narcissus. Flaubert's metaphors of masturbation may imply not only the artist's solitary pleasure in his art but the conscious and deliberate attempt to produce the excitement which makes that art possible. Icarus points to Daedalus: the exhibitionist may become the artificer.28 Flaubert's final image of himself — and, by implication, of the true artist — was a composite image of these various strains of conscious effort, rage, and asceticism. He identified ire and asceticism so intimately that he could admire the monastic life because it was an insult to bourgeois society, the triumph of individualism, "a fine slap given the human race, given to social life, to utility, to the common good." Like Gautier, Baudelaire, Leconte de Lisle, Flaubert pursued art because art was superfluous, though he granted that such have had to coin as a translation for Flaubert's "manustirper." "Manustirper," in turn, may have been a neologism created by Flaubert; it may have been merely a mistake. Flaubert seems, at any rate, to have been thinking of the verb "manustuprer." Finally, "manustuprer" itself would have been a neologism, though the noun "manustupration" — a medical term for masturbation — appeared as the title of an article in the Encyclopédie. Both Littré and the N E D admit it and say that it had reasonably frequent usage in the nineteenth century.

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Gustave Flaubert superfluity is the greatest of necessities. In one of his two polemic pieces, his preface to Bouilhet's Dernières Chansons, he attacked art that preaches, "democratic art," "official art." And Flaubert outdid his contemporaries in his hatred of the bourgeoisie.29 From his youth he concurred in the Romantic artist's scorn for the practical businessman. Describing the reaction to LouisPhilippe's arrival in Rouen in 1833, he could only exclaim, "How stupid men are, how limited the masses are . . .!" He and his friends invented the grotesque caricature of le Garçon, "a man addicted to all the vices," to concretize the bourgeois virtues they detested.* Flaubert's letters are filled with his distaste for the man of commerce, his disgust at the dubious progress of modern society. During the political crisis of 1850, he noted: "We are not dancing on a volcano, but on the plank of a latrine which seems fairly rotten to me." With the war of 1870, his horror and his disgust increased: " M y compatriots make me want to vomit." He was convinced that he was a witness to the end of a world, that the new society would be more distasteful to him than the old. He found a name for his enemy, an equivalent to Voltaire's infâme-, "We suffer only from one thing: la Bêtise. But it is formidable and universal." By bêtise Flaubert meant everything he hated: animality, ignorance, stupidity. "That is the true immorality," he wrote in 1877, "ignorance and bêtise. The devil is nothing else. His name is Legion." The young Flaubert wrote that the earth was in the hands of the Devil. The old Flaubert was of the same opinion: he merely identified the Devil with the ways of modern society.30 The position of the artist in relation to such a world was necessarily that of a highly vocal critic. Flaubert took pleasure * Ernest Seillière suggests (in Le Romantisme des réalistes: Gustave Flaubert, Paris, 1914, pp. 116-117) that in Flaubert's aesthetic mysticism, the Garçon represents such base qualities as bourgeois heredity, background, and milieu, and fills the role of the Christian Devil, the Tempter.

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ICARUS in identifying himself with Saint Polycarp, the raging monk of the first century, whose wonted exclamation was: "O good God, for what times hast thou kept me that I should endure such things?" He was, like Saint Polycarp, thoroughly outraged ("HHHindigné") by the society in which he lived. He piled up such adjectives in order to describe himself adequately: surly, intolerant, neuropathic, irascible, unsociable, outrageous. He added a new signature to the list in his correpondence: "The excessive Saint Polycarp, that good M. Flaubert." The irascible ascetic was the patron saint of Flaubert's last book, Bouvard et Pécuchet, for Flaubert planned the novel as an extension of the saint's cry: I am finally going to say what I think, exhale my resentment, vomit my hatred, spit out my bile, ejaculate my rage, deterge my indignation, — and I shall dedicate my book to the shade or Saint Polycarp. He thought of the book as a panorama of truth — which would also be a panorama of human bêtise. Truth had always been his aim in art: he accepted Joubert's dictum that truth may be reached more easily through the beauty of art. At the same time, he agreed with the bitter cry of Philothée O'Neddy: "Ah! le VRAI n'est pas beau! Le VRAI n'est pas aimable!" The contemplation of truth, according to Flaubert, demanded a firm will, strong eyes, and a strong stomach. He brought to the search for truth the ironic analysis he had envisioned through the character of Jules, but Flaubert's irony developed into a sense of the grotesquely absurd. His final aesthetic was a union of these two concepts, truth and the grotesque, a union he expressed in Bouvard et Pécuchet by turning the very search for truth into an "encyclopedia of human stupidity [bêtise]" a panoramic vision of the grotesque. The book was conceived first of all as vengeance. Maxime Du Camp asked the obvious question: "Vengeance for what? I have never

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Gustave Flaubert been able to figure it out, and his explanations on this subject have always been confused." It was also to serve as a spiritual purgative. Flaubert wrote of the novel to George Sand: ". . . I hope to purge myself in this way, and in the future to be more Olympian, something I am not at all now." He himself realized that he was by no means the harmless mandarin that Vigny was.31 The work in which Flaubert dramatized this realization — indeed, the entire image of himself as a furious ascetic — was La Tentation de Saint Antoine of 1872. The titular subject of the work was an obsession for Flaubert. Even before he saw Breughel's painting of Saint Anthony,* he had written a "mystery," Smarh (1839), in which the Devil and Yuk, the god of the grotesque, destroy the faith of a devout hermit by displaying to him the absurdity (in both the existentialist and the comic sense) of the universe. The poem was an obvious imitation of Faust-, it was one of those works in which the adolescent Flaubert painted the world in the hands of the Devil. The last moment of the poem is marked by the hideous laughter of Yuk, spirit of the real, the ugly, the grotesque, as he destroys the angel of the ideal. In 1849, Flaubert completed the first Tentation de Saint Antoine, which was less an imitation of Faust than a dramatization of the author's own situation. Antoine is a typical enfant du siècle, sick with the tedium of his life. He has come into the desert as a last resort since he has been unable to find the satisfaction of being martyred. The machinery of the drama is markedly more Christian than is that of Smarh: the Devil is accompanied by the Seven Sins, Antoine comforted by the Three Virtues. Flaubert expanded the temptation itself, which ranges from the pleasures of the flesh (incarnated in Antoine's only compan* Flaubert wrote to Alfred Le Poittevin, on May 13, 1845: "I have seen a painting by Breughel representing the Temptation of Saint Anthony, which gave me the idea of arranging the Temptation of Saint Anthony for the stage, but that would require a stronger fellow than I" (Corr, I, 173). 1

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ICARUS ion, a pig driven to fury by enforced continence) to an invitation to despair at the inanity of the universe and the endless series of gods in which man has believed. At the break of day, Antoine plunges into a prayer for mercy while the Devil warns him that Hell is in the heart of man. As does Smarh, the work concludes with a peal of hideous laughter. It was this poem that Flaubert read to Maxime Du Camp and Louis Bouilhet, whose criticism marked the close of Flaubert's strictly Romantic period. He condensed it in 1856, but the condensation is really no better than the original. La Tentation de Saint Antoine of 1872 is a completely new work. While it owes something to Flaubert's earlier treatments of the subject, it owes more to his mature image of himself. In spite of its dramatic form, in spite of its Christian machinery, La Tentation de Saint Antoine is Flaubert's most personal work, a work in which he portrayed the dilemma of the Parnassian artist.32 The first two sections of the drama are largely devoted to the lengthy monologues of the saint. Antoine is bored with his solitude, bored with his inutility: "It is useless for me to torment my mind! I have nothing to do! . . . absolutely nothing to do!" 33 He imagines the other vocations he might have chosen: priest, grammarian, soldier. And he recalls the pleasures of human company. The critical moment arrives when Antoine almost faints and says: "It's because I've fasted too much! my strength is leaving me. If I were to eat . . . just once, a piece of meat." 34 Antoine is — to borrow the phrase that Claude Vigee borrowed from Kafka — a Hunger-Artist, a penitent whose entire justification lies in the very act of renunciation. He does not even achieve a feeling of happiness in his asceticism: penitence has become for him an end in itself. The invitation to life presents itself in various forms: disembodied voices, visions, a cup that signifies material wealth. Antoine's reaction to his covetousness is rage: "I'd like to 1 76

Gustave Flaubert fight, or rather, to tear myself from my body! I've contained myself too long! I need to avenge myself, to strike, to kill; it's as if I had a herd of wild beasts in my soul! " 33 His desire for vengeance suggests Flaubert's. The self-reproach of the narcissist engenders the desire to wound others. The figurative attack of Bouvard et Pécuchet is dramatized as the destruction of Alexandria by a mob of raging eremites. Antoine envisions his own worldly success and once again reacts violently, punishes himself by self-flagellation. But the pain becomes pleasure: "My whole body tingles! What torture! what delight! it is like kisses. M y bones are melting! I am dying! " 36 Antoine loves his suffering as Flaubert delighted in his martyrdom for the sake of art. The voluptuous sensations of selftorture permit the dream of sensual pleasure. Antoine is tempted by the Queen of Sheba, who departs when the monk makes the sign of the cross. The temptations of Hilarion, Antoine's former disciple, compose the middle sections of the work. Hilarion appears first as a hideous dwarf: he is Yuk, the spirit of the grotesque. His first temptation is ironic contemplation; he forces Antoine to see the grotesque nature of his own life: Hypocrite, you bury yourself in solitude so that you can give in more easily to the flood of your desires! . . . you pity only your own wretchedness. Some kind of remorse grips you, a wild madness that makes you repulse the caress of a dog or the smile of a child . . . Your God is not a Moloch who demands human sacrifice! 37

A n adequate gloss of these lines would include the whole of Flaubert's correspondence, the record of his retreat from the horrors of life into the masturbatory pleasures of the imagination, his attempt to destroy his sensibility with ironic selfanalysis, his conviction that the discipline of the artist was that of the self-torturer. Hilarion displays to Antoine the grotesque heresies in which man has dabbled, the grotesque gods in

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ICARUS which he has believed. It is in these passages that the Christian machinery of the drama is most apparent; but the parade of absurd beliefs and idols may well be, as are the equivalent sections in the first Tentation, Flaubert's representation of "the extraordinary, the fantastic, the shriek of metaphysics and mythology" which was natural to him and from which he wanted to escape. Hilarion finally reveals himself, transformed into an archangel, as la Science. As in Bouvard et Pécuchet, knowledge and grotesque irony are identical. But Flaubert saved the hideous laugh of Yuk for his "encyclopedia of human stupidity." La Tentation de Saint Antoine ends with a vision of salvation, the descent of grace. The conclusion may be purely gratuitous. Antoine withstands the Devil's invitation to accept a meaningless universe, rejects the complementary seductions of la Luxure and la Mort, which are really both forms of death. But he succumbs to the final temptation, that of matter itself: "I want to fly, to swim, to bark . . . to merge with all forms, penetrate every atom, descend to the very bottom of matter, — to be matter! " The aesthetic developed by Flaubert and the Parnassians — Brunetière went so far as to call it Naturalism — involved the artist's submission of his personality to the object he was portraying. The Ding-an-sich was more important than was the manifestation of the artist's personality, the central ethical and aesthetic tenet of Romanticism. Flaubert's cult of impersonality, his desire to express reality as it is — "as it always is in itself, in its generality and detached from all its ephemeral contingencies" — was, in a sense, a desire to be absorbed by matter. According to Georges Poulet, Flaubert's consciousness of himself found full expression only in the moment of perception, when he identified himself with an object outside himself. Objectivity, Poulet suggests, was the natural state of Flaubert's thought. The rare and privileged moment, as Flaubert envisioned it, was the moment in which mind and body, life and nature would be united. If we accept Poulet's 178

Gustave Flaubert views, the descent of grace with which the Tentation concludes appears as the expression of a sort of aesthetic sanctification, essential to and congruent with the rest of the work. It is then a vision marked by that same pantheism Flaubert felt in his youth, a chastened version of the epiphany witnessed by Jules: " . . . Nature participated in this harmony, and the whole world appeared to him, reproducing infinity and reflecting the face of God . . ." Such a reading is difficult to accept. Antoine's vision of the world of matter is clearly a temptation, one from which the saint is saved only by the descent of grace. The hallucinations of the night disappear with the rising of the sun. Jesus comes not to sanction Antoine's desire to be absorbed by matter, but to pardon him in spite of his yielding to temptation, to precipitate his return to the spiritual task at hand. Flaubert once wrote to Louise Colet that life must be either the natural experience of love and pleasure or "something that resembles it and that negates it, that is to say the Idea, the contemplation of the eternal, and, to sum it all up in a word, Religion in its broadest sense." The aesthetic of his maturity was life-negating, not pantheistic. The one living entity that subsists is the human intelligence itself. The legend of Saint Anthony dictated the conclusion of Flaubert's drama. If it is indeed a descent of grace — salvation dispelling temptation — this final vision represents the subsistence of the human intelligence in the world of matter. It is then as gratuitous as Flaubert seemed to think that intelligence was, as gratuitous as the absurd isolation of the artist's personality in a meaningless and hostile universe.38 —

4

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Flaubert's image of the ideal artist provides a number of interesting contrasts to the images developed by Hugo, Balzac, and Vigny. Hugo's conception of an Orphic mission necessitated the poet's identification with the spirit of his age: the aged Hugo, flying to the defense of France in 1870, could

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ICARUS cry out, "J e ne sais plus mon nom, je m'appelle Patrie!" Flaubert, on the other hand, chose to isolate himself from his society. The artist as he saw him was an enemy of the people, the violent and often somewhat nasty critic of modern society. Both Hugo and Flaubert could regard vengeance as a function of art. But Hugo believed that, as the poet inspired by God, he was exercising God's vengeance on human sin. Flaubert's vengeance was personal, the attack of an individual on his age.39 Flaubert's retirement into the Ivory Tower of his individuality also distinguished him from Hugo and from Balzac. His retreat, like that of Vigny, was in part an admission of fear and of failure. The headlong plunge into art, the submission of the artist's personality to matter, was in marked contrast to that demiurgic temper which permitted Hugo and Balzac to think of the true artist as a man who shaped the world, who imposed the order of his personality on the chaos of life. But Flaubert's retirement was distinct from Vigny's in that it was not the retreat of a stoic sage, but the isolation of a furious ascetic, who screamed imprecations on society from the top of his tower. Flaubert's withdrawal also seems more justified than does Vigny's. Vigny's refusal to participate engendered a refusal to write. The scattered fragments in the journal, the meager and often unsuccessful poetic production of Vigny's last years, scarcely atone for his unwillingness to admit that he was after all a human being. Flaubert gave up normal life in the name of art. He justified his action for himself — and, necessarily, for everyone — by producing a series of masterpieces. One may be annoyed by the bitterness of L'Éducation sentimentale or the nasty laughter of Bouvard et Pécuchet-, one can hardly deny that, absurd though what Flaubert did may be, he did it with consummate art. I 80

Chapter

VI

Charles Baudelaire and the Mirror of Narcissus

Romanticism, wrote Charles Baudelaire, "is a celestial or an infernal grace, to which we owe eternal stigmata." Like Flaubert, his exact contemporary, Baudelaire bore the marks of two Romantic attitudes, the mal du siècle of René's languorous descendants and the satanism of the frenetic JeunesFrance. His admiration of the Sainte-Beuve of Joseph Delorme and Volupté and for the Lycanthrope Petrus Borel were clear indications of these two tendencies, the two strains he characterized as "melancholic" and "orgiastic." The image he chose to describe his debt to Romanticism, that of grace, is not a thoroughly adequate one. Baudelaire's relationship to the themes and techniques of Romanticism was not that of a purely passive recipient. As Louis Maigron has indicated, "Baudelairisme" did indeed exist before Baudelaire. But Baudelaire transformed many — though not all — of the themes he inherited from his predecessors; what he did, essentially, was to give a new reality, a greater depth, and a greater significance, to what had been merely literary manners, convenient and conventional modes of expression.1 His much discussed satanism provides a perfect illustration i 8 i

ICARUS of the way in which he transformed his Romantic heritage. Romantic satanism — a compound of exaggerated individualism, pride, and the pretense, at least, of a penchant for evil — was primarily an attitude of revolt. Hugo and Balzac avoided certain unfortunate consequences of this attitude in identifying Satan with Prometheus, as the rebel sanctioned by God or as the demiurgic poet. Baudelaire was heir to a petty satanism which expressed itself in insults hurled at the bourgeois, the épicier. He offered ironic blandishments to the bourgeoisie in the prefaces to his Salons of 1845 and 1846. But the liminal piece to Les Fleurs du mal — an invitation to the reader to acknowledge his own vices — and the saturnine "Épigraphe pour un livre condamné" were no less insulting than were the diabolic pronouncements of Petrus Borel and Philothée O'Neddy. In their desire to épater le bourgeois, the Jeunes-France were uninhibited exhibitionists, Chats de coulisse, endêvés! Devant la salle ébahie Traversant, rideaux levés, Le théâtre de la vie. If the artist was considered the mysterious and aristocratic cat — and Baudelaire entered Champfleury's panorama of Bohemia, Les Aventures de Mademoiselle Mariette, as "the Poet of cats" — the bourgeois was the dog that recoiled in fury from the delicate perfumes of art, to which he preferred the ordurous odors of commerce. Baudelaire's association of animality with bourgeois insensitivity recalls the complex of attitudes and behavior that Flaubert stigmatized as bêtise. "The grocery-man is something great, a heavenly man whom we must respect, a man of good will!" Baudelaire wrote, with heavy irony, in 1846. T w o years later he participated in the revolutionary attack on those men of dubious good will.2 Baudelaire's activities in 1848 — his collaboration on La 182

Charles Baudelaire Tribune nationale and Le Salut public, his rush across the barricades — were a dramatization of the merely verbal satanism of the Jeunes-France. "I am republican as a werewolf might be republican," Petrus Borel had proclaimed in 1831. "My republicanism is lycanthropy!" Baudelaire's concern for the revolution, noted Charles Asselineau, was an artist's love for color and movement, not a citizen's regard for his country. Baudelaire himself described his reaction as "literary inebriation; memories of things I had read." But the same note contains another explanation: "Taste for vengeance. Natural pleasure in destruction." The need for revenge was in part an expression of the poet's hatred for his stepfather, the conservative General Aupick. It also suggests Flaubert's desire for vengeance, the need to release a compressed rage which prompted him to write Bouvard et Pécuchet. Les Fleurs du mal contained the same rage. "The man of letters is the enemy of the world," Baudelaire noted in his journal; and he wrote of his poetry that it would remain "as testimony of my disgust for and hatred of everything." Feeling that even this was not enough, he intended to take complete vengeance in Mon cœur mis à nu, "a spiteful book": "I shall turn my real talent for impertinence against the whole of France. I need vengeance as a tired man needs a bath." After the portrait of himself, the portrait of the world. Baudelaire's last projected work was a study of Belgium, the arguments of which he hoped to turn against France itself: "It is my separation from modern stupidity [bêtise]. Perhaps people will finally understand me!" As Flaubert indicated in La Tentation de Saint Antoine — and as modern psychology attests — such attacks on others are displacements of the anger one feels against one's self. When Baudelaire characterized his anger as the "natural pleasure in destruction," he recognized in himself the animality he attributed to the bourgeois — and animality was for him synonymous with satanic tendencies. Behind his 183

ICARUS satanic proclamations, his way of outraging the bourgeois, stood the hope of arousing a real anger in his readers, a hope for rejection. "I should like to set the whole human race against me. I see in that a pleasure that would console me for everything," he wrote to his mother; and he noted in his journal, "When I have inspired universal disgust and horror, I shall have acquired solitude." Even when one makes an allowance for a probable exaggeration, such statements are revelatory. They point to Baudelaire's characteristic persona, that of the self-torturing Narcissus. The phrase is not a contradiction in terms. With Baudelaire, the Romantic image of the artist as ideal type changes. Hugo, Balzac, Vigny — and even Flaubert, in spite of his futile aspirations to Olympian calm and his conviction that such aspirations make us worthier than do our works — all regarded themselves as incarnations of the ideal. Hugo was the Orphic poet, Balzac the demiurge with an unconquerable will. Vigny retired into his Ivory Tower, and Flaubert devoted himself to "the ironic acceptance of life and a thorough plastic remodeling of it through Art." Baudelaire recorded rather the distance between his image of himself and his idea of the perfect artist. In so doing he provided an example of Bovarysme, the quality which Jules de Gaultier recognized in both Emma Bovary and Frédéric Moreau, and which he defined as man's ability to conceive of himself other than he is — and his inability to realize this ideal image of himself. In terms of a stricter psychology, in Freudian terms, as I have suggested, this is a distinction between the ego and the ego-ideal, what one is and what one thinks one should be. It accounts for the element of self-torture, the constant awareness of failure that permeates Baudelaire's work. 3 Self-torturing though he may have been, Baudelaire the poet may still be characterized as a Narcissus. He was a lyric poet — and a lyric poet in the line of Lamartine, Hugo, and

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Charles Baudelaire Musset. O n l y after Baudelaire would the objective lyricism of Mallarmé and modem poetry be possible. W h e n he invited the hypocritical reader to see himself in the mirror of Les Fleurs du mal, Baudelaire was being no less "lyric," no less subjective than was H u g o in claiming that Les Contemplations was a mirror for all men simply because it was the record of his o w n soul's development. In 1866 Baudelaire wrote to Ancelle, of Les Fleurs du mal: Do I have to tell you (since, like everyone else, you couldn't figure it out) that in this atrocious book, I have put all my heart, all my tenderness, all my religion (travestied), all my hatred? It's true that I shall write the opposite, that I shall swear by the gods that it is a book of pure art, of pretence, of imposture; and I shall be lying through my teeth.4 T h e partisans of "pure art" have tended only too regularly to think of Baudelaire as if he had written after the development of the poetic methods which his o w n w o r k made possible, and not to see him as a Romantic in the process of transforming Romantic manners and techniques. T h e aesthetic of Les Fleurs du mal is only incidentally an impersonal, Parnassian aesthetic. It is primarily an aesthetic of the personality. Baudelaire did transform lyricism, however: this transformation accounts for the peculiarity of his persona and of his poetic method. From Rousseau on, the t w o clear aspects of Romantic lyricism were the two facets of narcissism, selfcontemplation and self-display. A n early Romantic like H u g o could pose directly before his public, could make his narcissistic self-analysis seem subservient to Icarian exhibitionism. V i g n y could pose before his journal and publish only his reflections — a conscious ambiguity — in impersonal Parnassian poems. In both cases, the analysis preceded the display. Baudelaire reversed the process. H e allowed the reader to catch him in the very act of self-confession or self-contempla185

ICARUS tion, of gazing into the mirror of his own sensibility. W e see, as it were, both Narcissus and his reflection, the actual poet and the ideal image of the artist, the unsatisfactory self and the unsatisfied conscience. "The artist," wrote Baudelaire in his article on laughter, "is an artist only on condition of being double and of not being unaware of any phenomenon of his double nature." 5 The same ironic analysis which produced satanic laughter when exercised on the behavior of others had necessarily to be turned on the self. Thus for Baudelaire, satanism was not merely a literary fashion, but a function of that basic archetype of his thought, the stance of Narcissus. Attacks on society were one means of defining the self for others, presenting a particular image of the self to others. Baudelaire portrayed himself as a member of the race of Cain, as a worshipper of Satan, so that he might be rejected by society, for the ironic analysis of the self led to the realization that the self was detestable: Tête à tête sombre et limpide Qu'un cœur devenu son miroir! Puits de Vérité, clair et noir, Où tremble une étoile livide, Un phare ironique, infernal, Flambeau des grâces sataniques, Soulagement et gloire uniques, — L a conscience dans le Mal! 6

The Romantic heritage was a celestial grace and an infernal gift at once. The artist's mark of superiority, the double nature that permitted him to examine himself in the mirror of his own sensibility, was also his curse, since it led to the awareness that his personality was far from admirable. The ambiguity lies in the word conscience itself: it is impossible to distinguish the lyricist's gift of self-contemplation from the critical eye of conscience. Narcissus, "the lover of himself," i 86

Charles Baudelaire inevitably becomes the self-torturer. And the héautontimorouménos in turn becomes the enemy of his audience. "Plainsmoi!" ends the "Épigraphe pour un livre condamné," repeating the plea for pity implicit in all Rousseau's autobiographical pieces. Baudelaire completes the progression that made of Rousseau the model for the outcast protecting himself with Satan's veil of pride: "Plains-moi! . . . sinon, je te maudis!" Poetry was for Baudelaire a way of dealing with the basic concern of Romanticism, the dilemma of the individual personality. In his work the dilemma assumed a complexity it did not possess before. The self was to be preserved and asserted, a problem much greater for the Vignys, Flauberts, and Baudelaires than it had been for the Hugos and Balzacs with their single-minded belief in the efficacy of a titanic will. The self was, at the same time, detestable, even before it was judged so in the light of its own conscience. For Baudelaire, the self was detestable because it possessed the satanic tendency toward animality, toward nature, and nature was for him — as for the Parnassians in general — something disgusting, something from which one had to escape. "Analyze everything that is natural, all the actions and desires of the purely natural man," he wrote in 1863, "and you will find nothing that is not frightful. Everything that is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and of calculation." The human being, according to Baudelaire, was a depraved animal until he began to think: Bonald's celebration of man as an intelligent being reinforced for Baudelaire the Parnassian distaste for the physical life. With both his personal reactions and the lessons of a certain Catholicism to strengthen the literary ethic of the mid-nineteenth century, Baudelaire surpassed the other members of his generation in their headlong flight from life. The Goncourts dismissed the world 187

ICARUS as a worn-out, second-rate landscape. Leconte de Lisle fled the human passions, "black birds of prey," and addressed to the dead Théophile Gautier his hopes for an escape from the flesh: Moi, je t'envie, au fond du tombeau calme et noir, D'être affranchi de vivre et de ne plus savoir La honte de penser et l'horreur d'être un homme!

Flaubert expressed the same desires for death and insensibility, for escape from life and man's estate, in his letters and in the last Tentation de Saint Antoine. All the Parnassian aesthetic, as Brunetière pointed out, was an attempt to fix the Protean flux of life, to overcome the rush of time.7 Baudelaire poured into his poetry his own more acute sense of the horrors of the human condition. Man's life, as he envisioned it, was a state of ennui and of spleen, a mixture of melancholy and dissatisfaction which produced a mal du siècle of the greatest intensity. The weight of memory, the proof that man had lived in time, was balanced only by the force of ennui, the horror of having to continue such an existence: —Désormais tu n'es plus, ô matière vivante! Qu'un granit entouré d'une vague épouvante, Assoupi dans le fond d'un Sahara brumeux . . .8

The statement of fact is actually an expression of the desire to transform living matter into the stone sphinx which hums when warmed by the rays of the setting sun. That the statue of Memnon near Thebes resonated when touched by the rays of the rising sun, and that Baudelaire carefully adapted the reality to his own state of mind, clearly indicate the nature of his wish for an end rather than a beginning. The desire for insensibility culminated in Baudelaire, as in Leconte de Lisle, in the desire for death. "Le Voyage" and the prose poem i 88

Charles Baudelaire "Anywhere out of this world" were perhaps Baudelaire's most explicit statements of this yearning for non-being. But death for the Hamlet who was Baudelaire was also the dream filled with memories: . . . je cherche le vide, et le noir, et le nu! Mais les ténèbres sont elles-mêmes des toiles Où vivent, jaillissant de mon œil par milliers, Des êtres disparus aux regards familiers.9 That the self was to be preserved as well as destroyed intensified the dilemma. Romanticism was for Baudelaire indeed an infernal grace. His concern with his own personality, an entity that was at once precious and detestable, necessitated a particular interpretation of the Parnassian flight from life into art. His aesthetic accounted both for the Icarian assertion of the self and the rejection of the self as an entity subject to the processes of life. Baudelaire's solution was an escape from the real personality, the one that lives in time, that bears the weights of memory and responsibility, into a world of poetry which permitted the transformation of the self into something that could be admired, that was worthy of being preserved. Théophile Gautier was the master Baudelaire chose to follow. From the mid-eighteen-thirties on, Gautier had preached the lesson of poetry, the lesson of language and style — he had preached, but with a generous admixture of frivolity. Baudelaire, like so many poets and critics after him, took Gautier's somewhat ironic pronouncements in dead seriousness. T h e frivolity of Banville — which Mallarmé would continue through his puns and plays of sound, in the supreme game of poetry — is almost completely lacking in Baudelaire. For him, the art of language was truly le grand art, l'art sacré, alchemy, b y means of which nature could be overcome. In an unfinished poem addressed to Paris, a projected epilogue

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ICARUS to Les Fleurs du mal, he called on the angels and the city itself to bear witness to his accomplishments: Anges revêtus d'or, de pourpre et d'hyacinthe, O vous, soyez témoins que j'ai fait mon devoir Comme un parfait chimiste et comme une âme sainte. Car j'ai de chaque chose extrait la quintessence, Tu m'as donné ta boue et j'en ai fait de l'or. T h e Fleurs du mal are dedicated to Gautier, the "faultless magician" of French poetry; and, appropriately, Baudelaire defined the concept of language as magic art in a discussion of Gautier's style: "There is in the word, in the logos, something holy that prohibits making it a game of chance. W h e n you handle a language skillfully, you are practicing a sort of evocative sorcery." These ideas probably had no little part in dictating Baudelaire's activities as a theorist, his defense of his role as a poet-critic. In his article on Wagner, Baudelaire explained that poets must inevitably become critics, if they are to remain great poets: I pity those poets who are guided by instinct alone; I consider them incomplete. In the intellectual life of other poets, a critical moment arrives without fail, at which they want to reason about their art, to discover the obscure laws in virtue of which they have produced, and to draw from this study a series of precepts of which the divine goal is infallibility in poetic production. His theories and criticism were in no w a y disinterested: they complemented his poetry. " A l w a y s be a poet, even in prose," he wrote in his journal, and he was primarily a poet. T h e concern for language as a magic art b y which nature might be overcome, the contributions of the critical writings, ultimately direct us back to Baudelaire's essential concern, the transformation of the self in art.10 Baudelaire developed two methods b y which this transformation could be accomplished. W h e n through the pro-

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Charles Baudelaire sopopoeia of "La Beauté" he permitted Beauty to speak for herself, the goddess compared her nature to that of "un rêve de pierre" and "un sphinx incompris." 1 1 Both phrases — the first explicitly, the second implicitly — convey a double meaning. Beauty is both the dream, the eternal mystery, and the statue, the concrete Parnassian work of art. Romanticism had already distinguished between the suggestive dreams of the poète and the practical creation of the artiste. Baudelaire accepted and extended the distinctions, but he did not regard them as mutually exclusive activities. This is w h y he could be accepted as an associate b y the Parnassians and recognized as a precursor b y such Symbolists as Verlaine: his aesthetic of the personality contained both the "closed vision" of Parnassianism and the "open vision" of Symbolism. T h e escape from the self and the transformation of the self through dream were associated in Baudelaire's thought with the use of such artificial stimulants as drugs and wine, with music, with perfume, with the ecstasy of losing one's self in the personality of a woman. A t the farthest point of such an experience, art disappears: there is nothing left but the dream. " L a Chambre double" describes this state: A room that is like a day-dream, a truly spiritual room, where the stagnant atmosphere is lightly tinted pink and blue. There the soul bathes in laziness, perfumed by regret and desire.— It is something crepuscular, bluish, pinkish; a voluptuous dream during an eclipse.12 T h e "spiritual room" is an image of man's desire to escape from the satanic animality of nature: "spirituality" and "animality" were antonyms for Baudelaire. 13 T h e dream of the ideal, as the image of the closed room suggests, is also a desire for death. T h e timeless room is a symbol of both the dream-self and the grave. T h e furniture in the room seems to have a dream-life of its own, no solid contours. O n the bed

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ICARUS lies the woman, "the queen of dreams," who may be Death herself. A n d — On the walls no artistic abomination. In comparison with the pure dream, with the unanalyzed impression, definite art, actual art is a blasphemy. Here everything has the sufficient clarity and the delightful obscurity of harmony.14 Baudelaire's rejection of art in this description of the ideal state provides one more answer to those critics who insist that his only concern was the production of perfect poems. Baudelaire's point of departure was psychological rather than aesthetic: the dream-state described in "La Chambre double" is more than the dream of poetry as a Lamartine or a Gambara would have understood it. A s the flask of laudanum which appears in that twilight room would suggest, the most complete analogues to the "pure dream," "the unanalyzed impression," are Baudelaire's own descriptions of hashish dreams. His discussions of the artificial paradises created b y drugs and alcohol are a strange mixture of approval and condemnation — the same pattern one finds in his image of the selftorturer, who sins in order that he may reproach himself. T h e use of hashish and the remorse it engenders approach "diabolical perfection," the voluptuous analysis of one's own remorse. T h e frequent references to the terrible awakening on the "morning after" are more than balanced b y the description of the ideal state man may achieve through the use of drugs. Baudelaire begins Le Poeme du haschisch b y praising man's desire to escape from reality and to attain the ideal. H e considers this rare aspiration "a veritable grace, . . . a magic mirror in which man is invited to see himself beautified, that is, as he should be and could be; a sort of angelic excitation, a call to order in a complimentary form." T h e image is that of the ego-ideal. T h e escape is clearly not complete: the self is transformed rather than rejected. Hashish provides "a 192

Charles Baudelaire mirror that magnifies, but a simple mirror" — that is, it allows for the transformation of the real self and can, in fact, do nothing more. But Baudelaire wants it to do nothing more. H e traces the progressive stages of hashish intoxication, the last of which is a glorified narcissism. He who uses the drug comes at last to believe that the universe was created for him, and he cries out, "I have become God!" H e is a god who exists in and for himself: Shall I add that hashish, like all solitary joys, makes the individual useless to other men and society superfluous to the individual, driving him to admire himself ceaselessly and hurrying him day by day toward the luminous abyss in which, Narcissus-like, he admires his face? Yet Baudelaire had pretensions to filling an Orphic role. In hashish intoxication, he wrote, one reaches "that mysterious and temporary state of mind, in which the depth of life, bristling with its many problems, is revealed in its entirety in the spectacle, natural and trivial though it may be, that is before one's eyes, — in which the first object one comes upon becomes a speaking symbol." This is the moment at which one perceives the correspondences, the universal analogies, which the poet is privileged to reveal to mankind. 15 The poet, Baudelaire wrote in his article on Hugo, is essentially a translator, a decipherer. It is he who understands the correspondences between this world and the realm of the ideal, who points out in his poetry the meanings hidden in various objects. The world as we know it — "reality" or "nature" — thus possesses only the value of the minor term of comparison in a metaphor. The ideal world and poetry take on the value of "true" reality: Poetry is the most real of things; it is what is completely true only in another world. This world, dictionary of hieroglyphics.

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ICARUS Baudelaire praised poetry and music because through them alone were men able to obtain a sure glimpse of the higher reality, the ideal. The idea did not originate with Baudelaire. He himself attributed it to Swedenborg and Fourier; it appeared in French literature at least as early as the eighteentwenties. Baudelaire's mentor, Sainte-Beuve, wrote that the artist "received at birth the key to symbols and the understanding of figures," that poets . . . ont des nuits brillantes et sans voiles; Us comprennent lesflots,entendent les étoiles, Savent les noms desfleurs,et pour eux l'univers N'est qu'une seule idée en symboles divers. Some years earlier Alexandre Soumet had written that "everything is symbolic in the eyes of the poet, and, by a continual exchange of images and similes, he tries to rediscover a few traces of that primitive language revealed to man by God Himself, . . . and he realizes that beneath the various objects with which he is surrounded, there exists something other than these objects themselves." For Baudelaire, the concept took on a significance it could not have had for earlier writers. If the symbolic value of the world is all-important, then nature has no value except that which it acquires in being "spiritualized." The mud of this world must be alchemically transformed into the gold of poetry. Baudelaire, who was even more vehement than most in his denunciation of utilitarian art, philosophical art, could still pretend that the transforming powers of the imagination, which provided for him a means of escape from the realities of the human condition, had an importance for men other than himself.16 He exalted the imagination, claimed that it was "the most scientific of the faculties, because it alone comprehends universal analogy," called it the "queen of the faculties." Almost alone among French poets, he considered the imagination the 1

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Charles Baudelaire shaping faculty, the magical faculty of creation, the faculty that made man most like God. He deplored the growing popularity of photography, because photography reproduced nature, and nature, he believed, exists only for the purpose of being transcended. Such a faith in mental processes and in the transformation of the world through magic, Freud has pointed out, is characteristic of the primitive mind and recurs in the mind of the child. Baudelaire did not dabble in primitivism, but his theories did involve the glorification of infantilism. Painting, like poetry, was for Baudelaire "an evocation, a magical operation," which demanded the freshness and frankness of a child. On two occasions, he defined genius itself as "childhood clearly formulated, gifted now with virile and powerful organs with which to express itself." In his Salons, this glorification took the form of a call for naïveté, the immediate expression of the personality in painting: " . . . naïveté, which is the domination of the temperament in one's manner, is a divine privilege that almost everyone lacks." He lamented the fact that most nineteenth-century painters were too facile technically and praised Delacroix for his naïveté. Gautier's reflection that Baudelaire was one of those careful craftsmen in whom "simplicity would be . . . pure affectation, a sort of inverted mannerism," suggests that Baudelaire's interest in naïveté might be explained by the law of attraction of opposites. But Baudelaire lamented his own lack of immediacy: "It sometimes seems to me that I have grown too rational and that I have read too much to imagine something frank and naive." He believed the purely instinctual poet, the "inspired poet," incomplete; but he did not dismiss inspiration as Flaubert did, and inspiration may provide the key to his infantilist theory of genius: "Nothing is more like what we call inspiration than the joy with which a child absorbs form and color." Sartre's interpretation of the theory of genius as childhood rediscovered — that the child lives in a world 195

ICARUS organized for him by his parents — is provocative but unsatisfactory. The child, as Baudelaire saw him, is man before the Fall, the natural man of "ces époques nues,/ Dont Phoebus se plaisait à dorer les statues," when nature had not yet been sullied by sin. But the child is also the perfect narcissist: he is able to absorb the forms and colors of the world because, like the man intoxicated with hashish, he believes that they have been created for him. The masturbatory pleasures of the imagination, the narcissistic enjoyment of hashish dreams, and the nciivetê of the child are essentially the same experience. All three permit the transformation of the true self that Baudelaire sought in art.17 The other means of escape from life, the submission of life to art common to the Parnassians, was no less important for Baudelaire. In his poetry, the suggestive value of the symbol often tended to produce allegorical or emblematic verse: he did not distinguish between emblem and symbol and found allegory "such a spiritual genre." * Barbey d'Aurevilly was thinking of this aspect of Baudelaire's thought when he said that Baudelaire was a materialist, because the highest perfection he could conceive was the perfection of form. The aesthetic concept depended on the pseudo-religious one. Since Baudelaire found nature ugly and sinful, he could agree with neoclassicism and become a theorist of the Decadence in saying that art improved on nature. The eyes of Beauty are "de purs miroirs qui font toutes choses plus belles." The mirror of art is a magic mirror that makes the world bearable: "Everything that is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation." Baudelaire called on the child once more — and, this time, on primitive man as well — to justify the "spirituality" of the cult of form: "By their naive striving for shiny things, * "Un genre si spirituel" — and the predictable translation would be "such a witty genre," or "such a clever genre." But spirituel normally carries enormous weight for Baudelaire, and I feel that my translation is easily justifiable because of that.

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Charles Baudelaire for multicolored feathers, iridescent materials, for the superior majesty of artificial forms, the primitive and the baby bear witness to their disgust with the real and thus prove, though they are unaware of it, the immateriality of their souls." The justification occurs in the chapter of Le Peintre de la vìe moderne entitled "Praise of Cosmetics." Baudelaire interpreted the flight from reality into art as a flight into artifice.18 The glorification of the artificial, as the praise of cosmetics would suggest, most often appeared in his poetry about women. He once wrote that he wanted to follow the footsteps of Petrarch and Parny, but his Petrarchism took the form of sado-masochism. It was also a way of conventionalizing human reality: "chivalry in feeling" is equivalent to a submission of emotion to elaborate ritual, a freezing of the self. The cult of the dame, as Baudelaire practiced it, was the expression of neurotic tendencies: J e t'adore, ô ma frivole, Ma terrible passion! A v e c la dévotion Du prêtre pour son idole.

His love-poetry, if one can call it that, is a reenactment of the ritual: the woman is turned into an idol — or, to put it more justly, she is recreated, turned into something artificial.* For woman, as Baudelaire saw her, was the incarnation of nature. In other words, she was a stupid animal. "Woman cannot separate the soul from the body," he wrote in his journal. "She is one-sided, like the animals. — A satirist would say that it is because she just has the body." The "satirist," one need hardly add, was Baudelaire himself. Woman was onesided; man, the artist, was double. He alone possessed the * Gautier, at about the same time, transformed woman into the static work of art in " L e Poème de la femme" (Émaux et camées). A n d Murger wrote, in Scènes de la vie de bohème (Paris, 1859, p. 216): " T h e r e exist among true artists some curious Pygmalions who . . . would like to be able to change their living Galateas into marble."

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ICARUS tendency toward God, spirituality — though he also possessed its ironic counterpart, a satanic tendency toward animality. The expression of this latter urge occurred in intimate conversations with dogs and cats and in the love for a woman. "Loving intelligent women is a homosexual's pleasure," Baudelaire wrote; he continued, with that curious logic he could not have learned even from Maistre and Poe, "Thus bestiality excludes homosexuality." 19 In his one piece of fiction, La Fanfarlo (1847), Baudelaire established a pattern he was to follow in his poetry. His hero, Samuel Cramer — an aesthete even more curious than Gautier's d'Albert — manages to win the affection of the actress, la Fanfarlo. She takes him to her home and presents herself to him in the nude. Samuel holds her off and cries out that he wants her dressed as Colombine, in a costume patterned and multicolored like that of an acrobat. As the maid rushes to the theater for the actress's dress, Samuel shouts, "Hey! don't forget the lipstick!" Baudelaire tried to explain this aberration as a carefully reasoned position. For Samuel, he wrote, love was "an admiration of and an appetite for the beautiful; he thought reproduction a vice of love, pregnancy a spider's disease. He has written somewhere: angels are hermaphroditic and sterile." The pseudo-Platonism notwithstanding, Baudelaire's poetry revealed the aberration for what it was, an attempt to escape from the realities of the human condition and to transform the despicable self. He elevated woman to the status of an idol, thus avoiding the acceptance of woman's carnal reality: "She is a kind of idol, stupid perhaps, but dazzling, enchanting, whose gaze holds suspended destinies and wills." The goddess of Beauty was capable of the same enchantment. Baudelaire's Muse and Madonna and Beloved was a White Goddess (in Robert Graves's sense of the term) in whose presence the man, the poet, lost his individuality, in whose eyes he became a pet or a thing. "There are women who make us want to overcome them and to take our pleasure 198

Charles Baudelaire with them; but this one makes us want to die slowly under her gaze." The ideal woman was the sterile woman, wearing heavy make-up and much jewelry, an inhuman work of art.20 While Hugo as the Orphic priest of nature identified woman and the earth, Baudelaire, the celebrant of artifice, identified woman and the city. In the epilogue to Le Spleen de Paris and in a projected epilogue for Les Fleurs du mal, he addressed Paris exactly as he addressed his various mistresses, calling the city his "très-belle," his "charmante," describing it as "l'énorme catin/ Dont le charme infernal me rajeunit sans cesse." When Fernand Desnoyers asked him to contribute to a volume of poems on nature, Baudelaire wrote a violent note attacking pantheism, in which he said, "I have always thought that there was in Nature, blooming and rejuvenated, something impudent and distressing." His contributions to the volume were two tableaux parisiens, the two "Crépuscule" poems. The city, for Baudelaire, was an equivalent to the painted woman in more senses than one. Paris was nature reformed, controlled, brought under the influence of calculation and art. His role, as poet of the city, was to translate the artificial landscape of Paris into the greater artifice of poetry. The "heroism of modern life," a complex of manners, regulations, constrictions, balanced "le souvenir de ces époques nues": neither was quite real. Baudelaire carried the process of "de-realization" farthest in "Rêve parisien," a poem equivalent to "La Chambre double," in which he envisioned a world free from time, free from life, an artificial paradise in the strictest sense: Babel d'escaliers et d'arcades, C'était un palais infini, Plein de bassins et de cascades Tombant dans l'or mat ou bruni . . .* * See "Paysage," in which the same transformation occurs. The other relationship to nature developed in Baudelaire's poetry is pathetic fallacy: see the various "Spleen" poems, and especially "Horreur sympathique": 1

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ICARUS The landscape in the poem is all metal, marble, ice, and precious gems. Paris becomes the Byzantium of the Decadents.21 In two poems, the verse and prose versions of "L'Invitation au voyage," Baudelaire combined the two movements away from reality. The land to which he invited his beloved was a timeless dream-world made in her image: the city and the woman were one. It was a "pure dream," bathed in muted light; it was also an artificial paradise, filled with shining furniture, mirrors, oriental splendor. Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté, Luxe, calme et volupté.22 The prose version clarified the double nature of this Cocaigne: "Curious country, superior to all others, as Art is to Nature, where the latter is reformed by dream, where it is corrected, embellished, remodeled." Dream and artifice combined to make reality unreal, to permit an escape from the real self and the real world into "that atmosphere in which it would be good to live." 23

Baudelaire faced the ethical and psychological equivalents of these two aesthetics in his treatments of the ideal artist, his articles on Edgar Allan Poe, and his various notes on the nature of the dandy. The dream found its equivalent in the concept of disorder, artifice in that of concentration. In the first of his articles on Poe (1852) Baudelaire remarked that Longfellow had praised the "abundance" of Poe's style. "Does he think Edgar Poe is a mirror?" 24 he asked. The quesCieux déchirés comme des grèves, En vous se mire mon orgueil; Vos vastes nuages en deuil Sont les corbillards de mes rêves, Et vos lueurs sont le reflet De l'Enfer où mon cœur se plaît.

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Charles Baudelaire tion was a revelation. The fascination Poe exercised on Baudelaire was the fascination the narcissist experiences before his own reflection; the French poet found in the American an image of himself. He wrote to his mother in 1854: Something rather curious, and something I can't help noticing, is the intimate resemblance, though not clearly marked, between my own poetry and that of this man, allowing for the differences of temperament and climate.25 In later years he dropped the qualifications: Do you know why I have so patiently translated Poe? Because he was like me. The first time that I opened one of his books, I saw with terror and delight, not only subjects I had dreamed of, but SENTENCES I had thought, and which he had written twenty years before.28 Poe was not, however, an exact reflection of Baudelaire; he was an improvement, as art or dream is an improvement on nature. Poe provided the ideal image against which Baudelaire could measure himself: the narcissist may love not what he is, but what he would like to be.27 Poe was the author of a completed body of works while Baudelaire was forever unable to realize his projects, his work in process. Poe had an adoptive father who was reasonably kind while Baudelaire had General Aupick. Poe received the attentive consolations of Mrs. Clemm while Baudelaire faced the uncomprehending reproaches of his mother. Above all — and Sartre's study of Baudelaire provides the most suggestive interpretations — Poe was dead, a completed destiny, while Baudelaire continued to bear the weight of time and ennui. In defending Poe, in proclaiming his greatness, Baudelaire could escape from the realities of his own life and could project an ideal image of the artist. One cannot forget that the articles on Poe preceded the publication of Les Fleurs du mal, nor that the aesthetic discussed in them was Baudelaire's own.

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ICARUS Baudelaire's studies of Poe really did constitute a defense, the defense of disorder. In the two biographical articles, those of 1852 and 1856, he excused Poe's drunkenness on the grounds that it was only through drink that Poe was able to awaken the visions he captured in his tales and poems. Intoxication was, to use the phrase Baudelaire had not yet found, an artificial paradise. There was a long tradition of disorder in Romanticism. "Pour tout peindre, il faut tout sentir," proclaimed Lamartine, and his contemporaries echoed the cry. Fourier defended the passions as useful to man, and the Romantics accepted Fourier. Disorder of the personality was completed by disorder of life, the greatest example of which was the life of Hoffmann. Ampère, in an article on the German author published in 1828, portrayed Hoffmann sneaking into disreputable taverns and there "giving in to all the intemperance of his soul, to all the debauches of his imagination," drinking in order to produce visions. The following year, Loève-Veimars, the translator of the Fantasiestiicke, repeated the equation of drunkenness and a fruitful imagination. Saint-Marc Girardin and Philarète Chasles followed suit. The JeunesFrance, those "chats de coulisse, endêvés" — and "endêvé" means both "possessed by devils" and "undisciplined" — accepted the image and turned to their bowls of flaming punch. A translation of Cellini's Vita provoked one reviewer to write, " A prejudice respected in our times would have it that the artist, to be complete, must be a sort of pandemonium of human passions," thus responding to the satanic image of the artist current among the fanatics of freneticism. And in 1836 Alexandre Dumas père consecrated the image of the disordered artist in Kean, ou Désordre et génie. His hero, "a veritable hero of debauchery and scandal," answered the suggestion that he order his existence: Have order! . . . that's the ticket; and genius — what will become of genius while I have order? . . . With a life as agitated

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Charles Baudelaire and as full as mine, do I have the time to calculate minute by minute and pound by pound what I must spend of my days or dissipate of my money? By the eighteen-forties, disorder had become the prerogative of Bohemia. Murger, the poet-laureate of the gutter, devoted himself to the description of "a class ill judged up to now, and of which the greatest fault is disorder; and even then they can excuse themselves by pointing out that this disorder is a necessity imposed upon them by life." But at the very moment when the bourgeois public was accepting Murger's sentimentalized pictures of Bohemian life, the Bohemians themselves were hoping for new destinies. Murger entered the fold of the Revue des Deux Mondes and finally won the cross of the Légion d'honneur. Both Parnassians and auteurs honnêtes, the Goncourts, Flaubert, and Octave Feuillet rejected the Bohemian concept of the artist's life, "that world beyond reality, outside the law, where reign passion without rules and thought without brakes . . ."* Baudelaire, however, kept one hand on the tradition. "Let's be different," he said, according to Champfleury, "as others had said, 'Let's be sublime! ' " In defending Poe's drunkenness, Baudelaire was largely defending himself. "It is painful for me," he wrote in 1859, "to be known as the Prince of Swine"; he resented Barbey d'Aurevilly's calling Poe "the King of Bohemians." f 28 * T h e works in which the Goncourts did away with the sentimental legend of Bohemia were Charles Demailly and Manette Salomon. Especially in the latter, in the character of the aging Bohemian Anatole Bazoche, they revealed the tragic waste of potential engendered by the Bohemian "artist's life." t Barbey d'Aurevilly wrote four articles on Poe, all of which are reprinted in Littérature étrangère (Les Œuvres et les hommes: XIXe siècle, 2nd ser.1), Paris, 1891. His first article (1853) was quite sympathetic; the second presented Poe as an exhibitionist, a materialist, and a damned sinner. T h e third article (1858) was that in which he called Poe "the King of Bohemians" (p. 376). Eugène Crépet included in his Charles Baudelaire (pp. 329-330) a letter from d'Aurevilly to Baudelaire, dated M a y 14, 1858, in

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ICARUS Drunkenness was for Poe a flight into fantasy and dream; it was also a flight from the world in which the poet is necessarily a martyr. Baudelaire revived in his articles on Poe the hoariest Romantic notion, the image of the martyred poet, the man cursed with a fatal destiny. "You would say that the blind Angel of expiation has seized on certain men, and whips them with all his might for the edification of others," he wrote in his first article; and in the second he proclaimed: . . . I add a new saint to the list of martyrs: I have to write the story of one of these glorious wretches, too rich in poetry and in passion, who came after so many others to perform in this world the rough apprenticeship of the genius among inferior men. Poe's drinking, which produced his poetic visions, also helped to kill him: the blessing and the curse were one. Baudelaire, who rejected as "Romantic gibberish" * Champfleury's use of religious terminology in speaking of art, suggested that poets pray to Poe as an intercessor and conceived a portrait of the American author, "surrounded by allegorical figures representing his major conceptions, — somewhat like the head of Jesus Christ in the center of the instruments of the Passion — the whole thing in an insanely Romantic manner, if it's possible." The figure of the martyred poet was the dominant one in Baudelaire's three articles. He created a vision of an America more materialistic, more fond of mediocrity, more cruel to aristocracy of blood or genius, than was France. Against this background he set the figure of Poe, whose physical and spiritual beauty contained "something both shadowy and brilliant." Poe was for Baudelaire the true beau ténébreux, the incarnation of satanic irony, but he was a Satan victimized by the false god Mammon. It is in connection with this image of which the critic defended himself against Baudelaire's objections, which have, unfortunately, been lost. * Champfleury was thinking of circulating a prospectus in which he had written, " T h e author has only one belief: the Novel."

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Charles Baudelaire Poe that one should consider Baudelaire's poems on the poet's fatal destiny, "Bénédiction," "L'Albatros," "Le Guignon," "Sur le Tasse en prison d'Eugène Delacroix," "La Muse vénale," "Le Vieux Saltimbanque." None of them added anything to the Romantic stereotype they described. Only Baudelaire's poems on Lesbians — whose strange loves expressed the desire for union with a reflection of the self — contained a statement significantly different from those of earlier Romantics. But an interesting contrast to his image of Poe was Baudelaire's article on Hégésippe Moreau. Baudelaire dismissed this French Chatterton as a spoiled child who had profited from the legend of the misunderstood and unfortunate genius, who had made of himself "an ideal figure, damned but innocent, dedicated from birth to undeserved suffering." The irony of which Baudelaire was so proud, though it functioned only too well on Moreau, failed when he thought of his own life. He wrote a description of his tortured existence in a letter to his mother in 1853, and asked, "Do you now understand why, in the midst of the frightful solitude that surrounds me, I understood Edgar Poe's genius so well, and why I wrote so well of his abominable life?" 29 There is an explanation for this apparent contradiction. Moreau used the "curse of genius," according to Baudelaire, as an excuse for not working. Poe, on the other hand, brought to his work the order he lacked in his life: "It is indeed a remarkable fact that a man of such an erratic and ambitious imagination should be at the same time so in love with rules, and capable of studious analysis and patient research. You could almost say that he was an antithesis in the flesh." Poe was not only a disordered genius and a martyred poet; he was also an example of Baudelaire's peculiar concept of the aristocratic aesthete, the dandy. Once again, Baudelaire used Poe's life as an image for his own. He knew that the combination of genial disorder and the discipline of the dandy was possible: 205

ICARUS he had realized the combination in his own life. Gautier wrote, in his famous Notice on Baudelaire: "One might say of him that he was a dandy lost in Bohemia, but retaining there his station, his manners, and that cult of the self which characterize the man imbued with Brummel's principles."30 Poe in the role of the dandy appeared to Baudelaire as a Virginian aristocrat isolated in a democracy, an aristocrat of art trapped in a nation of utilitarians. "From the bosom of a world hungry for material things, Poe took flight into dreams" — but he took the time to recognize the natural perversity of his compatriots and to hurl insults at them. "An artist," Baudelaire paraphrased from Poe's Marginalia, "is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of the beautiful, a sense which brings him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformity and all disproportion." * Gautier's dandy, the effete d'Albert, had said, "It is a veritable torture for me to see ugly things or ugly people." DAlbert's morality was a cult of beauty: "My ethics are reduced to this: what is physically beautiful is good, everything ugly is evil." When Baudelaire, in "Hymne à la beauté," asked, De Satan ou de Dieu, qu'importe? Ange ou Sirène, Qu'importe, si tu rends, — fée aux yeux de velours, Rhythme, parfum, lueur, ô mon unique reine! — L'univers moins hideux et les instants moins lourds? * Poe wrote: "Give to genius a sufficiently enduring motive, and the result will be harmony, proportion, beauty, perfection — all, in this case, synonymous terms. Its supposed 'inevitable' irregularities shall not be found: — for it is clear that the susceptibility to impressions of beauty — that susceptibility which is the most important element of genius — implies an equally exquisite sensitiveness and aversion to difformity." (The passage appears as Marginalia VIII in those editions which follow the sequence of James A. Harrison's Virginia Edition; and as Marginalia LXIX in those which retain the sequence of the original Griswold-Willis-Lowell edition.) Apart from his general rewording of Poe, Baudelaire's most important change is the substitution of the word "artist" for "genius" — a substitution characteristic of French Romanticism from the beginning.

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Charles Baudelaire when he excused Chateaubriand's incestuous passions on the grounds that they were necessary to his genius, he was following d'Albert's line of reasoning. In the cult of the dandy, aesthetics replaced ethics. T h e common critical opinion that Baulelaire's dandysme was a spiritualism, is only a half-truth. Barbey d'Aurevilly had made the same claim in his discussion of Brummel, and dandy sme was indeed opposed to commercial materialism. Baudelaire noted in his journal: "Being a useful man has always seemed to me something truly hideous"; and: " A Dandy doesn't do anything. Can you imagine a Dandy speaking to the masses, except to scoff at them?" H e scorned those men who were "made for the stable, that is, to exercise what are called professions," and furiously attacked the nineteenth-century faith in material progress. But just as his symbolism tended to become emblematic and allegorical, Baudelaire's spiritualism tended to produce an immense concern with the material. T h e cult of la Toilette was not, as Marc Eigeldinger has suggested, merely symbolic of the spiritual attitude of the dandy. It was an intrinsic part of his existence.31 For Baudelaire's dandy sme was the ultimate refinement, the ultimate internalization of the fascination he found in artifice. His aspiration to the estate of the dandy was another expression of his attempt to escape from the living self b y turning that self into a work of art. One cannot dismiss the obvious affinities of his ideas with Byronic satanism, the concept of aristocratic disdain he associated with Chateaubriand, and the sado-masochism represented b y Maistre's religious theories;* but these doctrines were subsidiary to Baudelaire's primary * I have in mind Maistre's theory of sacrifice and, still more, Baudelaire's acceptance of it: "Sacrifice is complete only through the willing participation of the victim" (OC, p. 1204, Mon coeur, X X I ) . Numerous texts in Mon coeur wis a nu deal with the victim's submission to torture and sacrifice and the beauty of sacrifice. These pseudo-political ideas should be related to the sado-masochism of Baudelaire's love-poems.

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ICARUS concern, the preservation of the self in a purified form. The dandy's discipline was "self-purification and anti-humanity" — and the latter term meant rather the rejection of human nature than opposition to society. This is why Baudelaire could reject woman as "the opposite of the dandy." Woman, unless sterile and covered with jewelry, was "natural, that is, abominable. Thus she is always vulgar, that is, the opposite of the dandy." The dandy had to be impeccable, unable to sin or err: "Poe is always correct." In other words, the dandy was free from the burden of original sin, free from the natural life of the flesh, free from his life as a man. Even the moral aspects of the dandy's attitudes expressed the same desire to escape from human realities. "The dandy aspires to insensibility"; in the midst of world destruction, the dandy stands firm in his stoicism, "resigned to the future, drunk with his self-possession and his dandysm," scorning the base bourgeois. To carry the attitude to its logical conclusion, Baudelaire wrote: "Stoicism, a religion that has only one sacrament: suicide!" Insensibility and death are both forms of "self-purification," ways of escaping from the human condition.32 The dandy is clearly another version of the Baudelairian Narcissus: "The Dandy must aspire to being sublime without interruption. He must live and sleep in front of a mirror." He and his fellows — like the child, like the man intoxicated with hashish — please only themselves: "These creatures have no other estate than to cultivate the idea of the beautiful in their own persons, to satisfy their passions, to feel and to think." Baudelaire scorned those who could only think and amuse themselves as a group: "The true hero finds pleasure by himself." The cult of the dandy was an "auto-idolatry," in which all the faculties were to be augmented and conserved. The application of these theories to the matter of sexuality went beyond Flaubert's metaphors of masturbation. For the aesthete, sexuality was nonexistent: 208

Charles Baudelaire The more a man cultivates the arts, the fewer erections he gets. There occurs an increasingly apparent divorce of the mind from the animal. The animal alone has good erections, and sex is the lyricism of the people. Having sex represents a desire to enter into another; the artist never gets out of himself. Baudelaire established a dialectic of "prostitution," the spontaneous giving of self, and "concentration," the dehumanization of the self and its transformation into a work of art for its own enjoyment. Love for him was prostitution, the desire "to be two." T h e artistic genius on the other hand "wants to be one . . . G l o r y consists in remaining one, and in prostituting one's self in a special way." Baudelaire wanted to be the greatest of men — but for himself: " T o be a great man and a saint for one's self, that is the one important thing." Flaubert wanted to produce for his own pleasure, to write for his own satisfaction. Baudelaire wanted to be for his own pleasure: his aesthetic was a w a y of life. A t the farthest point of the aesthetic of the personality, the discipline of the dandy, as at the farthest point of the dream, art was impossible: " W h a t is art? Prostitution." Baudelaire here seems to give to the word "prostitution" the full meaning he denies it elsewhere — prostitution is literally the act of selling out, a diminution of the self. T h e absolute narcissist, the perfect dandy, the "true hero" would not be a poet at all.33 — 3 — It was surely fortunate that Baudelaire was his own bad example, that he never attained the condition of insensibility and concentration to which he aspired. " T h e vaporization and the centralization of the SELF. Everything lies in that," 34 he wrote; and in "Le Thyrse" he compared genius to the engarlanded pole carried b y the Bacchantes:

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ICARUS The staff is your will, straight, firm and unshakeable; the flowers are the drift of your fancy around your will, the feminine element executing its prestigious pirouettes around the male.* 35 H e himself possessed the feminine quality of genius, the melancholy languor, and the aspiration toward the ideal which he recognized in Poe and Poe's sickly heroines, which he portrayed in his various poems about Lesbians. W h a t he lacked, he felt, was the masculine will which could support the play of fancy, the pleasures of dream. A s early as 1847, in La Fanfarlo, he had said of his semiautobiographical hero, Samuel Cramer: He is at one and the same time tunist, and an illustrious wretch; nothing but half-ideas. The sun of ously within him, vaporizes and which heaven granted him.

a great loafer, a pitiful opporfor he has had in his lifetime laziness, which shines continuconsumes that half of genius

Samuel was an author of beautiful failures, impotent, a hermaphrodite— a Wenceslas Steinbock, a Frédéric Moreau. But that was the young Baudelaire; the older Baudelaire wrote that "the taste for productive concentration must replace, in a mature man, the taste for waste." H e recognized in himself this tendency toward the diffusion of the will, denounced hashish because it destroyed the will. H e criticized the image of the disordered Romantic artist: "Haven't you noticed that nothing is more like a perfect bourgeois than the concentrated artist of genius?" H e regarded Flaubert, who led a quiet life in Croisset, producing masterpieces in the company of his mother, as an example of the perfectly concentrated artist.38 In fact, Baudelaire created an entire gallery of artist-heroes who stood beside Poe as examples of the ideal to which he * Baudelaire borrowed the image of the thyrsus from De Quincey (who had, however, used the word "caduceus" and conveyed a far less panic impression): the rod and the garlands represented the single purpose and the discursive method of Confessions of an English Opium-eater ( O C , p. 472, Un Mangeur d'opium).

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Charles Baudelaire aspired. He ridiculed Léon Cladel's Alpinien Maurthal, the protagonist of Les Martyrs ridicules, for making a pilgrimage to the grave of Balzac.* But Baudelaire himself turned to Balzac as an example: No one will ever be able to imagine how clumsy, how naive, and how stupid this great man was during his youth. And yet he managed to have — to procure for himself, so to speak — not only grandiose ideas, but also a great deal of wit. But he worked ALL THE TIME.

Balzac's titanic will was a source of envy for Baudelaire: "I don't have Balzac's courage, I don't have his genius, and I have all the difficulties that made him so unhappy." Delacroix also provided a model: Baudelaire defined him as "an immense passion, accompanied by a formidable will." Delacroix, he wrote, loved his Ivory Tower, the atmosphere of secrecy and concentration. Baudelaire, on the other hand, lacked will; he had only nervous energy. He wrote to another of his heroes, Sainte-Beuve: "When I see your activity, your vitality, I am covered with shame; fortunately I have jolts and fits in my character which replace, though very insufficiently, the action of a continuous will." The conviction that he had to get down to work filled the letters of the last ten years of his life: "The great and sole object of my life now is to make of work, the most boring thing in the world, something pleasant by sheer force of habit." He reproached himself not only in his letters, but in his journals: he posed as a prodigal in his own eyes. "Work," he wrote, "necessarily engenders good behavior, * Baudelaire's article on Les Martyrs ridicules is very strange indeed. H e considered the novel an ironic answer to Murger's sentimental studies of Bohemia, and he ridiculed in Alpinien Maurthal the very qualities he himself possessed — weakness, hypersensitivity, self-pity. Cladel's novel strikes me rather as a fairly ordinary study of the mal du siècle and not in the least as a satire. It is perfectly possible, of course, that Baudelaire saw the novel for what it was, realized its inferiority, and tried to save it by claiming that it was a brilliant satire. Or perhaps the irony that functioned so well when exercised on others and failed so thoroughly when exercised on himself was at work again. 2 I I

ICARUS sobriety and chastity, and thus health, wealth, continuous and progressive genius, and charity. Mind the business at hand." He imposed on himself a strong discipline — or considered doing so — of work, rejection of stimulants, prayers to God, his father, and Poe. His trip to Brussels was an act of penance. He stayed even though he hated it there: "I suffer and I am bored . . . I am doing penance, and I shall continue to do so, until the causes for the penance disappear." His life was, in fact, one long act of penance, a long series of self-reproaching letters and notes. He carried with him the weight of his disorder — his debts, his laziness, Jeanne Duval, the syphilis that finally killed him. " M y life," he wrote to Poulet-Malassis, "will always be composed of angers, deaths, outrages, and especially of dissatisfaction with myself." Baudelaire was almost an incarnation of that Renaissance type, the Malcontent; he was a self-torturing Narcissus who punished himself because his reflection was not as beautiful as he thought it should be. Are we to apply to Baudelaire Flaubert's dictum: "Our aspirations make us worthier than do our works"? Baudelaire himself, in creating his persona, called for his readers to reject him. Such a judgment as A. E. Carter's — "He was somewhat unhealthy; it is part of his charm; it saves him from being banal" — is surely inadequate. It seems more appropriate to cite Freud's description of the man suffering from melancholia, a description which comes from an essay that deals with the questions of the ego-ideal and of conscience: When in his exacerbation of self-criticism he describes himself as petty, egoistic, dishonest, lacking in independence, one whose sole aim has been to hide the weaknesses of his own nature, for all we know it may be that he has come very near to self-knowledge; we only wonder why a man must become ill before he can discover truth of this kind. For there can be no doubt that whoever holds and expresses to others such an opinion of himself — one that Hamlet harboured of himself and all men — that man is ill, whether he speaks the truth or is more or less unfair to himself. 2 I 2

Charles Baudelaire Only the phrase on the deliberate concealment of weakness seems inapplicable to Baudelaire, since he displayed his weaknesses freely, in his letters, in his journals, in his poems. And, as Balzac loved Lucien de Rubempré in his weakness, Baudelaire seems to have loved the weakness in himself. His letters to the unfortunate Madame Aupick are an unbelievable series of self-defenses — no one understood poor Baudelaire — and of whining pleas for pity. He humiliated himself compulsively, confessed over a period of twenty years the sins he never abjured: " . . . I am a wretched creature made of sloth and violence." He yearned for rejection. When he went to Brussels, he spread rumors about himself: that he was a police spy, that he was a homosexual, that he had killed and eaten his father. He wrote to Madame Paul Meurice: "I swim in dishonor like a fish in water." The only way out he could envision was the neurotic's way out, through magic: "One must have the will to dream, and one must know how to dream. Evocation of inspiration. Magical art." His prayers to Poe are explained by this belief: "Magic applied to the evocation of the great dead, to the reestablishment and perfectioning of health." His poetry assumed a function far beyond that of pure art, even beyond being a means to the transformation of the living self. All his work must be read in the light of the prayer he included in the prose poem, "A une heure du matin," one of the several poems that takes the form of selfconfession: . . . and you, O Lord my God! grant me grace so that I may produce a few beautiful lines of verse which prove to me that I am not the last of men, that I am not inferior to those whom I despise. If Baudelaire denied the possibility that art might be useful to society, it was because he insisted that art should be useful only to him, as a way of escaping his living self and manifesting himself in the image of the self-torturing Narcissus.37 2 i 3

ICARUS Is it possible to dismiss Baudelaire as a hopeless neurotic whose works were nothing more than the manifestations of his disturbed personality? It is true that the image of himself which he projected in his poems — and in his letters and journals — provides a striking contrast to the self-portraits of Hugo and Balzac, of Vigny and Flaubert. Baudelaire's flight into the unnatural paradises of dream and artifice betrays a sensibility far more unsettled than that of such a poet as Hugo, who tried to come into contact with nature itself, to transcend the natural world by comprehending it. The titanic will celebrated by Balzac, although it may suggest the celebration of egomania, is surely preferable to Baudelaire's voluptuous wallowing in his lack of will. Vigny and Flaubert, who also faced the problem of rejecting a world and a human condition they could in no way accept, suffered with dignity; Baudelaire, in this respect the ideal Decadent poet, had almost no sense of human dignity. He was, one might conclude, all the Lucien de Rubemprés, the Chattertons, the Frédéric Moreaus rolled into one. His art and his way of life itself were attempts to deny life. Yet was Sartre right? and did Baudelaire get only what he deserved? The question really has no meaning. Who can say what any man deserves? and who can say what manner of man Baudelaire really was? The face of Satan and the figure of Narcissus, the two aspects of Baudelaire's attitude of selftorture, are only masks. Baudelaire, the perfect comédien, posed no less in his journals and letters than in his poems. "Let him be himself!" wrote Barbey d'Aurevilly in i860, in his review of Les Paradis artificiels. "We no more want a Baudelaire-Poe than a Baudelaire-De Quincey. We want Baudelaire!" The request was ultimately unanswerable: the most that a lyric poet can give to his readers is a mask. Wilde's paradoxical remark that "a mask tells us more than a face" is only half true: a mask tells us both more and less than does a

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Charles Baudelaire face. It can never reveal to us the man himself. But what Wilde said of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright may well be true of Baudelaire: "These disguises intensified his personality." The poet's mask, like the persona of the ancient actor, is exaggerated; but the mask of the lyric poet is an elaboration of his own features. Baudelaire in the guise of Poe, or behind the work of De Quincey, or in the masks of Satan and Narcissus, projected an image of himself that had an importance far greater than did his life. As another old poseur, Jean Cocteau, has written, " W e only sit as models for our glorious portrait." It was not eternity that changed Baudelaire into a semilegendary figure; it was Baudelaire himself.38 Baudelaire called for pity, and his cry was often an offensive whine; but it was more than a demand in his own name. It was a consequence of the realization that the aspirations of earlier Romantics were somehow impossible, that the age had declined and that a moral Decadence had begun. Like the other members of his generation, Baudelaire attempted the Icarian flight to the sun of Romanticism— Mais ie poursuis en vain le Dieu qui se retire; L'irresistible Nuit établit son empire, Noire, humide, funeste et pleine de frissons . . . In portraying himself as Icarus, Baudelaire stated both his sense of failure and the nostalgia for flight that Bachelard has equated with the flight itself: En vain j'ai voulu de l'espace Trouver la fin et le milieu; Sous je ne sais quel œil de feu Je sens mon aile qui se casse; Et brûlé par l'amour du beau, Je n'aurai pas l'honneur sublime De donner mon nom à l'abîme Qui me servira de tombeau. 2

1

5

ICARUS Baudelaire had called for both anger and pity from his readers. I am not sure that pity is not the more appropriate reaction. Behind Baudelaire was the Romantic image of the artist, an image he could not approximate—because of the peculiarities of his own life, because of the atmosphere of the period in which he lived, perhaps even because the image was all but impossible to realize. What Anatole France said to Flaubert is truer still of Baudelaire: "There, there goes the scapegoat for the follies of Romanticism, the chosen beast on which lie all the sins of the tribe of genius." 89 — 4 — And there remains the art. What Sartre forgot was that art is a transcendence of narcissism—even when it elaborates the image of Narcissus. Baudelaire suggested this very truth when he defined art as "prostitution," for by "prostitution" he meant both a diminution of self and a free giving of self. The dandy is an absolute narcissist only when he is a perfect dandy, a state to which Baudelaire at times aspired, but which he never attained. The obverse of Narcissus, as Baudelaire himself seems to have realized, is Icarus; but in posing as Icarus, Baudelaire uttered a lament more tragic than it need have been, a lament as untrue as Keats's similar statement. Separated from Baudelaire by the gulf of a century, Les Fleurs du mal have indeed become what their author only half meant them to be, objective statements. The irony of Baudelaire's greatness, as Martin Turnell has said, lies in the way in which he expressed his sense of failure.40 The counterweight to Baudelaire's morbidity and to the Romantic stereotypes that mar many of his poems is — T . S. Eliot has made the point 41 — his mastery of the art of poetry. Les Fleurs du mal are unhealthy, just as UÊducation sentimentale and Bouvard et Pécuchet are bitter. Like Flaubert, Baudelaire transcended the soured Romantic attitudes which he inherited and which he passed on to his successors, by the perfection of his art. 2 I 6

Chapter

VII

T h e Fate of Icarus T h e fate of Icarus frightened no one. Wings! wings! wings! they cried from all sides, even if we should fall into the sea. T o fall from the sky, one must climb there, even for but a moment, and that is more beautiful than to spend one's whole life crawling on the earth. In choosing to accept the suggestion of Théophile Gautier and to place the Romantic movement under the sign of Icarus, we must recognize that the myth of Icarus includes the hero's fall as well as his flight, that it is ultimately a myth of ambition and of failure. That other Icarian age, the Renaissance, tended to glorify the flight and to minimize the fall, to see in the fate of Icarus the fulfillment of a glorious destiny: Icare chut ici, le jeune audacieux Qui, pour voler au ciel, eut assez de courage: Ici tomba son corps dégarni de plumage, Laissant tous braves cœurs de sa chute envieux. O bien heureux travail d'un esprit glorieux, Qui tire si grand gain d'un si petit dommage! O bien heureux malheur plein de tant d'avantage, Qu'il rende le vaincu des ans victorieux! Un chemin si nouveau n'étonna sa jeunesse; Le pouvoir lui faillit, mais non la hardiesse: Il eut, pour le brûler, des astres le plus beau. Il mourut poursuivant une haute aventure; Le ciel fut son désir, la mer sa sépulture: Est-il plus beau dessein, et plus riche tombeau? 2 17

ICARUS Baudelaire's "Plaintes d'un Icare" responds to Philippe Desportes's celebration of Icarian flight with the lamentable proposition that the one consolation offered to the young hero — et tellus a nomine dicta sepulti — might not come to pass. The irony of Breughel's Icarus, as W. H. Auden has suggested, is that no one sees him fall. Icarus, the ambitious exhibitionist, must be seen. If he cannot portray himself as did Hugo, as a strong-willed and strong-winged hero — J'ai des ailes. J'aspire au faîte; Mon vol est sûr; J'ai des ailes pour la tempête Et pour l'azur— then he must follow Baudelaire and proclaim his weakness and his inadequacy. As the first thirty years of the nineteenth century seem a prelude to Hugo, who epitomized in himself and restated in his works, the themes and ideas which went into the making of Romanticism, so the last decades of the century seem a sequel to Baudelaire. "It seems that the school of Baudelaire exists," he wrote to his mother in 1866. That same year saw the publication of Verlaine's Poèmes saturniens, the very title of which was an allusion to the "Épigraphe pour un livre condamné." Gautier's famous Notice (1868) fixed the image of Baudelaire as a Decadent poet, an image fully developed in 1881 by Paul Bourget: "He was a man of the decadence, and he made himself a theorist of the decadence."1 Baudelaire's pose of self-denigration became the characteristic attitude of the Decadents. The artist was no longer Delacroix's Jacob, wrestling with the angel of reality, but Gustave Moreau's sickly poet, carrying his broken lyre to the Byzantine muse of artifice. Proust pointed out the feminine appearance of Moreau's poets: of the two elements of genius, the masculine will and the feminine sensibility, that Baudelaire had seen in the thyrsus, the latter became the more important.2 2 1 8

The Fate of Icarus The conviction that the period was one of decadence was general. Banville could express his regrets for the Icarian atmosphere of 1830 — Enfant divin plus beau que Richelieu, Musset chantait, Hugo tenait la lyre, Jeune, superbe, écouté comme un dieu. Mais à présent, c'est bien fini de rire—

but Baudelaire had suggested as early as 1857 that the artist had to accept his age: all one could paint at the hour of twilight was the melancholy glory of the setting sun, and the sun of the early Romantic faith was setting. Gautier mediated between the two periods, celebrating the great days of 1830 in the Histoire du romantisme and rephrasing Baudelaire's image of twilight in his preface to Les Fleurs du mal. The artist was still the child of his age; it was the age that had declined. In 1896, the cynical Jules Renard noted in his journal: ". . . with Hugo, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, genius climbed too high. It broke its back. Now it drags itself along the road like a village goose." As both Mario Praz and A. E. Carter have demonstrated, the sources of Decadent themes rose early in the nineteenth century; and the Decadent artist, the fallen Icarus, had ancestors: Obermann, Joseph Delorme, Stello, Lucien de Rubempré — all the "sensitive and sickly souls" who suffered from the mal du siècle. While these early figures were, however, often bad examples, the sickly Icarus of the Decadence broadcast his weakness and defended it. In spite of their intention to parody the literary fashions of the period, the authors of Les Déliquescences d'Adoré Floupette were not exaggerating greatly when they wrote a hymn for Decadent poets: Nos pères étaient forts, et leurs rêves ardents S'envolaient d'un coup d'aile au pays de Lumière. Nous dont la fleur dolente est la Rose Trémière, Nous n'avons plus de cœur, nous n'avons plus de dents.

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ICARUS Être Gâteux, c'est toute une philosophie, Nos nerfs et notre sang ne valent pas deux sous, Notre cervelle, au vent d'Été, se liquéfie! The withdrawal from life, which was for Vigny a mark of stoic disdain and for Flaubert the expression of a passion, clearly became an expression of fear in Baudelaire. But Baudelaire in some ways loved his fear and his weakness, and the young poets of the Decadence emulated him.3 It would be wrong, however, to consider the Decadence "the school of Baudelaire." The sources of Decadent themes, as I have said, may be traced at least as far back as the eighteenthirties; and the belief that the late nineteenth century was a period of decline and degeneration was a common one. Nor was Baudelaire the sole model for the Decadent artist. The eighteen-sixties saw the publication of L'Éducation sentimentale and of Maxime Du Camp's Forces perdues, the moral of which — "Exercise your will, if you want to be happy: outside of will, no salvation!" — responded to both Baudelaire and Flaubert and recalled the lesson of Balzac's tales of weak-willed artists. Still more important were two other novels published during the same decade, the Goncourts' Charles Demailly (i860) and Manette Salomon (1867), for the protagonists of both these books were artists in the strict sense and perfect examples of the Decadent type. The two novels tell the same story: the destruction of the austere and sensitive artist by the modern forces of vulgarity, ignorance, and indifference. Yet both the novelist Demailly and the painter Naz de Coriolis have the seeds of their own destruction within them. They are physically weak, the last frail representatives of their race. The Goncourts wrote of Charles Demailly: Delicate and sickly creature [nature délicate et maladive], born 2 2 0

T h e Fate of Icarus to a family in which had met the sickly delicacies [délicatesses maladives] of two races of which he was the last scion and the full realization, Charles possessed to a supreme degree the sensitive touch of impressionability. He had an acute, almost painful, perception of all things and of life.

As the choice of the very adjective used by Sainte-Beuve — maladif — would suggest, Charles Demailly owes no little to Joseph Delorme and to Stello; but the Goncourts translated this Romantic character into the terms of physiology, a technique they inherited from Balzac and would pass on to Zola, a technique characteristic of many novels of the Decadence. Charles's sickness, as he later learns, is anemia; and his doctor informs him that this is the sickness of the century, a "degeneration of the human species." Frail and lacking energy, Charles and Coriolis turn their natures in upon themselves, pay strict attention to the dolorous vibrations of their own organisms. Flaubert had already written that genius is indeed this propensity to suffer. T h e discipline of self-analysis, the Goncourts remarked, only aggravated the situation: "Through prolonged self-study, instead of becoming hardened, one flays one's soul and one's senses: one is wounded b y the least impression, with no defense, with no shell, covered with blood." In the novels they showed what must necessarily happen when such a "flayed soul" tries to participate in a life f o r which he is not suited. Both Demailly and Coriolis say that the artist must be a celibate, but both fall in love. Demailly marries the actress Marthe, Coriolis forms a liaison with the model Manette Salomon. What both men feel is actually the love of an artist for a work of art. Demailly sees in Marthe only the heroine of a play he is writing. A s for Coriolis: H e loved her as a man and as an artist. He loved this woman for her body, for the contours which it presented, for a tone that appeared somewhere on her skin . . . He loved her for placing 2 2 1

ICARUS before his eyes that Ideal of nature, that matter for masterpieces, that real and living presence of the Beautiful which her beauty offered him. Their loves prove to be their undoing. This is far from the selfishness of Théodore de Sommervieux, farther still from Del Ryès, who reconciled love and genius. But the unions of Demailly and Marthe, of Coriolis and Manette are more than marriages in a literal sense. The two women represent all that is vulgar and ignorant and false in modern society, all that Flaubert meant by the word bêtise. The brutality of their age destroys Coriolis and Demailly, because they are from the start too delicate to resist. The only positive faith that exists in the two novels is a faith in art itself, in the artist's conscientiousness. Like Flaubert, the Goncourts believed that the artist must protect his delicate self by isolating it from the horrors of the world.4 In 1870 Jules de Goncourt died. Nine years later his brother published Les Frères "Zemganno. The book was an act of contrition: Edmond was explaining his brother's death, which he felt he had caused by driving the sickly Jules too hard. In his preface, he explained that their goal had been a novel that would treat aristocratic society with the methods of realism, previously restricted to the working classes as in their own Germinie Lacerteux. In Les Frères Zemganno, this aesthetic struggle becomes what it had been for Banville, a leap from a trampolin. The Zemganno brothers, Gianni and Nello, devote themselves to the performance of a trick that will be truly theirs, a prodigious leap — but this acrobatic transposition of Icarus' flight ends in failure. Nello is crippled for life, and Gianni joins him in the only act he can still perform: ". . . the Zemganno brothers are dead . . . there remain only two fiddle-scrapers . . . who will play their fiddles . . . their behinds glued to chairs." 5 While it was more or less faithful to the Goncourts' life, this pitiful self-

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The Fate of Icarus portrait bears a strong resemblance to the pose which the young poets of the Decadence borrowed from Baudelaire. They, too, were fiddle-scrapers and portrayed their inability to handle the lyre of the eighteen-thirties. The new epithet of the type was of course maudit-, the poet was still accursed in his very nature, accursed with his own genius, and, like all the fatal heroes of Romanticism, a social outcast. Unlike the satanic Jeunes-France, however, he was markedly passive, accepting his fatal destiny and retaliating only in ironic comments which he turned on himself as often as he turned them on the world. Verlaine adopted this attitude of selfpity and ingrown irony and made it his very profession. He alternated between the pose of the suffering penitent and that of the lewd old drunk and became, as Baudelaire had become, "the Prince of Swine." He could dress himself up as "pauvre Lilian," the poet-pariah; Rimbaud's portrait of Verlaine as the "Foolish Virgin" seems somewhat more accurate. With Verlaine, the feminine element of the poetic personality found complete expression. T w o of the poets whom Verlaine included in his gallery of poètes maudits assumed strikingly similar poses. The tubercular Tristan Corbière joined the line of poètes poitrinaires which stretched back to pre-Romanticism; but his persona included an element of self-mockery alien to Millevoye and Charles Loyson: A moi, Myosotis! Feuille morte De Jeune malade à pas lentl Souvenir de soi . . . qu'on emporte En croyant le laisser — souvent!

He ridiculed Musset, Murger, Baudelaire, Lamartine, Hégésippe Moreau, the "créateur de l'art-hôpital," Escousse, Gilbert, Chénier, and cried out:

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ICARUS Métier! Métier de mourir . . . Assez, j'ai fini mon étude. Métier: se rimer finir! . . . C'est une affaire d'habitude.

Corbière could even write his own ironic epitaph: Mort, mais pas guéri de la vie, Gâcheur de vie hors de propos, Le corps à sec et la tête ivre, Espérant, niant l'avenir, Il mourut en s'attendant vivre Et vécut s'attendant mourir.

He was a maudit, but not the grand maudit: his attitude was that of the "Méphisto blagueur." 6 Jules Laforgue's persona was a more delicate version of the same figure. He too posed as the poète poitrinaire, an outcast, barred from participation in life's feast. Gilbert had been allowed to sit at the banquet table for a moment. Not Laforgue: Je suis le paria de la famille humaine, A qui le vent apporte en son sale réduit La poignante rumeur d'une fête lointaine.

He identified the "blancs parias" and the "purs pierrots," the Decadent version of Banville's admirable clown, and portrayed himself as the delicate mask who offered his laments to Our Lady of the Moon. Laforgue objectified this image of himself in his version of Hamlet, the first of the Moralités légendaires, which sports an epigraph worthy of Kafka: "It's stronger than I am." Laforgue's melancholy Dane is indeed a Decadent artist: he cannot bear the weight of his legend, that of the passive melancholiac who suddenly asserts himself as a man of action. This Hamlet never acts; his accidental murder of Polonius is totally unreal for him. He escapes his struggle with Laertes by hiding behind a gravestone until the 224

The Fate of Icarus funeral procession has departed. He is much more interested in the success of his play as a theatrical experiment than as a trap for his uncle's conscience; once King Fengo faints at the representation of his own crime, Hamlet rushes off toward Paris with the actress Kate, intending to establish himself as a playwright. He does not get far. Laertes plunges a dagger into the prince's heart, and Hamlet — who has learned that he is the brother of the jester Yorick, the son of a gypsy fortune-teller— dies, murmuring, "Qualis artifex pereo!" Professor Renato Poggioli suggests that this phrase is the characteristic dying gasp of the Decadent artist; as such, it can serve as a bridge from Laforgue's ironic image of the delicate poet to V Œuvre, Zola's story of the suicide of a degenerate painter.7

In VŒuvre (1886), Zola epitomized almost everything Romanticism had to say about the problem of the artist. He transposed all the themes which he used into a minor register, the melancholy air of the fin du siècle. As in the novels of Balzac and the Goncourts, of Murger, Champfleury, and Léon Cladel, there is in L'Œuvre a panorama of the Parisian world of the arts, concentrated this time around the Salon des Refusés. There is a cénacle-, unlike the idealistic groups drawn by Balzac, Murger, and the Goncourts, Zola's cénacle degenerates into a set of relationships marked by envy, resentment, and vicious criticism. There are examples of the ideal artist. But the austere painter Bongrand is past his prime, no longer able to equal the masterpieces that made him famous. He is aware that the decline of the age parallels his own decline: "Yes, the air of the age is bad, this end of a century weighed down by destruction . . . Nerves reach the breaking point, neurosis gets into the act, art is troubled: all is turmoil, anarchy, the madness of the personality at bay

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ICARUS » # s ^ e novelist Pierre Sandoz (largely a self-portrait of Zola) seems closer to the image of the concentrated man of artistic genius developed by Balzac. He plays the role played by Daniel d'Arthez in Illusions perdues, exemplifies an ideal betrayed by the friends of his youth. While the other members of the cénacle waste themselves in vague theorizing, fall prey to despair at the slightest reversal of their fate, complicate their lives with Bohemian liaisons, Sandoz marries, settles down to the bourgeois existence that Baudelaire envied and Flaubert realized in part, and devotes himself to what is obviously the writing of Les RougonMacquart: "The great work of his life was progressing, that series of novels, those volumes he released one after another with his obstinate and steady hand. He walked straight to the goal he had set for himself, without letting himself be overcome by anything, obstacles, insults, fatigue." 8 Sandoz has the last words in the novel, "Let's get to work" — Zola's motto as it was Balzac's; but he pronounces them at the cemetery where Claude Lantier has just been buried, and the positive faith they express is overshadowed by the atmosphere of decline and failure. Like Balzac, Zola uses the image of the serious, strong-willed writer as a counterpoint to his chief theme, the description of the Decadent artist. It does not matter whether the figure of Claude Lantier owes more to Cézanne or to Manet: it was Cézanne with whom Zola was in school, as Pierre Sandoz was in school with Claude; it was Manet's painting, Déjeuner sur l'herbe, that obviously inspired Claude's masterpiece, Plein air. What is important is that Claude belongs to the long tradition of Romantic artists. Like Lucien de Rubempré and Frédéric Moreau, he has come to conquer Paris: "Ah! Paris . . . it is ours, we only have to take it." Even when he sees his paint* The quotation contains the words "fin de siècle," here in the very process of taking on the meaning they have for us today.

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T h e Fate of Icarus ings ridiculed, he rallies his friends to the attack: "We have courage and audacity, we are the future . . . All right, Paris, you great beast, laugh, laugh until you fall at our feet!" But like his predecessors, he is easily discouraged, and worse, he is subject to an intermittent paralysis of the will, which grows in intensity and frequency as he grows older. He takes on the burden of a wife whom he cannot support, and they produce a monstrous child, a cretin whose intelligence decreases as his head expands and who finally dies of some obscure disease at the age of twelve. Claude is as unsuccessful in his career as in his personal life. He is too weak for the effort demanded by art: "That striving to create in the work of art, that strain of blood and tears from which he suffered, to create flesh, to instil the breath of life! Always battling with reality, and always vanquished, the struggle with the Angel!" After years of struggle, Claude gains admission to the Salon. His success is a bitter one: it is the painting of his dead child that is exhibited, and the only visitor who seems to notice it turns away in horror. Claude returns to the painting he has worked on for years, l'Œuvre of the title, a huge symbolic view of the Seine and l'Ile de la Cité. After a cruel argument with his wife Christine, during which he abjures art, he hangs himself in front of his unfinished panorama, a failure. Claude's end, however, was in his beginning. Like the artists of the eighteen-thirties, he is cursed with his own genius. Zola interprets the curse in physiological terms, as a case of bad heredity: "Yes, that must have been it, a jump too short or too far, the nervous unbalance from which he suffered, the hereditary breakdown which, on account of the excess or absence of a few grains of substance, instead of producing a great man, was going to produce a madman." Claude, like Charles Demailly and Naz de Coriolis, is delicate and sensitive, both mentally and physically. His sensitivity, the source of his genius, is also the cause of his death. Claude 2 2 7

ICARUS Lantier is the son of Gervaise Macquart and Auguste Lantier — a parentage as damning for him as was that of Minos and Pasiphae for Phaedra. The medical explanation in no way changes the basic fact. Claude's impuissance — the themeword of the novel, as of the Decadence itself — is a fatal lack of ability, a fatal impotence. There is no escape from the curse.10 Zola's novel is not merely a full description of the Decadent artist, a brutal portrait of the Icarus who falls, but also a summary of Romantic ideas about the artist in general. As a result, it provides a number of keys to an understanding of the Romantic faith in art. The struggle in which Claude fails is the struggle with the Angel, the attempt to create life — or, at least, to capture life in the medium of his art. Balzac had described exactly that struggle in Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu, and the outcome was the same. Frenhofer, like Claude Lantier, produces an impressionistic painting that goes beyond the fixed reality seen by the human eye; convinced finally of his failure to fix life on his canvas, he commits suicide. Balzac's tale fascinated Cézanne and Henry James and, it would seem, Zola: all found in it the cruel parable of the artist's heroic failure. But in his effort to deal with nature, the artist merely carries to the extreme the effort all men have to expend in dealing with life itself, with the reality they recognize as alien to their personality. The artist confronts nature as the ego confronts external reality. The practice of art thus becomes the extreme example of that basic Romantic dilemma, the manifestation of the individual personality and the attempt to impose the shape of that personality on the world; and the pattern I have tried to illustrate, from Hugo through Baudelaire, becomes a pattern of internalization, a retreat from immediacy. Romanticism saw the dilemma in terms of poetry and personality: the two elements are functions of each other, as it were, and as one in228

T h e Fate of Icarus creases — or so the nineteenth century thought — the other decreases. Baudelaire and Flaubert admired Hugo and Balzac for the sheer force of their personalities, their display of strength and will; they had reservations about the greatness of the art they produced. The second-generation Romantics, on the other hand, believed that they should hide their personalities, if not deny them completely, and that the ultimate value lay in pure poetry. There is an irony in this. Balzac is important today as the author of La Comédie humaine, the architect of literary realism; Flaubert was one of the greatest letter-writers of his age. W e appreciate in Hugo the variety of his images and the myths he created; we read Baudelaire because he speaks to us of his condition as a man. Yet the values established by the Romantics are still clear. Hugo and Balzac tried to deal with the world directly, to capture nature itself on their pages. Their desires to take an active part in the political life of their century complement Hugo's pose as the poet who reads the book of nature, Balzac's claims to being the creator of a world. Hugo's consistent method of affirmation — and self-affirmation — could easily lead us to believe that he accomplished what he set out to do, were it not that his poetry culminates in a description of war in heaven. Like that cosmic struggle of matter and spirit, guilt and innocence, the "nature" Hugo mastered was in great part a projection of his own mind. Balzac admitted to the difficulties of the poet's task more willingly, though rarely in his own name. The defeated poets of the Études philosophiques provide testimony of the obstacles the artist encounters in trying to impose his personality on the world. As Madame Êmile de Girardin suggested in La Canne de M. de Balzac, the novelist who pretended to be a strict scientist was really a magician: the attempt to capture reality in art is a search for the absolute. Vigny was less sure of the artist's ability to emulate the 2 2 9

ICARUS Demiurge. He gave lip service to the Romantic belief that a strong personality could shape the world, could overcome nature; and in "La Sauvage," he portrayed an Indian woman submitting to the superior wisdom of the Europeans who had tamed the New World. Vigny also regarded nature as "l'impassible théâtre," the hostile universe that man could not correct. His solution was to take refuge in a world of pure idea — "Study for the sake of Study" — and to write philosophical poems, intellectual statements from which the struggle with nature is absent. Baudelaire and Flaubert engaged in that struggle itself. Like Vigny, they scorned political activism; like Vigny, they eluded the direct relationship to reality attempted by Hugo and Balzac. They tried to deal with nature by transforming it into what it is not, into language. The process is, as Freud has pointed out — and Sir James Frazer before him — an exercise in magic. Baudelaire considered the art of poetry as sorcery or alchemy; Flaubert's search for the mot juste suggests primitive man's attempt to gain power over an enemy or a natural object by learning its secret name. In their more acute perception of their difficulties, Flaubert and Baudelaire may have come closer to capturing reality than did the first generation of Romantics. Still, as they had eluded the direct relationship with nature, nature ultimately escaped them. They were forced to take cognizance of the unbridgeable gulf between the ego and the external world of objects. At the end of their attempt stood the demon of style: language or technique magnified into an absolute. It is this same demon that confronts Claude Lantier, in the form of a nude woman he paints in the foreground of his panorama: ". . . this symbol of insatiable desire . . . this extra-human image of the flesh, which had turned to gold and diamond at his touch . . . " Zola might almost have been describing one of Baudelaire's poems or one of the Trois Contes-, and through the mouth of Pierre Sandoz, he

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The Fate of Icarus clearly stated that the obstacle which defeated Claude was part of his Romantic heritage: . . . his disease wasn't just in him; he was the victim of an age . . . Yes, our generation has wallowed in Romanticism up to the waist, and we are still steeped in it in spite of ourselves. We have scrubbed ourselves and taken baths in violent reality all in vain; the stain persists, all the lye in the world will not remove the odor. The obverse of that Romantic heritage is the faith in nature itself. Pierre Sandoz also proclaims this faith, one which dictated Zola's conclusions of both Les Rougon-Macquart and the Quatre Évangiles. Nature is "our common mother, the sole source of life! . . . the eternal one, the immortal one, in whom flows the soul of the world, a sap which fills even stones, and which makes the trees our big stationary brothers!" Hugo's pantheism was rarely more rhapsodic. Zola himself, in spite of his claims to objectivity, recognized the Romantic dilemma: the artist can escape neither the limitations of his personality nor the limitations of art when he confronts the world. Art can never be an absolute reproduction of nature: the attempt of Romanticism had necessarily to fail. In the full light of L'Œuvre, Pierre Sandoz's moral, "Let's get to work," is bitterly ironic. The artist's work is doomed to failure, the artist himself to self-destruction.11 That the figure painted by Claude Lantier is a woman points to another aspect of the opposition of poetry and personality, of art and life. One of the standard themes of the French Kunstlerroman is the opposition of a woman and a work of art, between which an artist must choose. It is the dilemma François Poussin faces in Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu, and one that recurs, in various guises, in Musset's Fils du Titien, Gautier's Toison d'or, and the Goncourts' two novels about artists. In L'Œuvre, it serves as a counterpoint to Claude's torments of creation and provides the cruel climax 23 I

ICARUS of Zola's tale. The enmity Christine, Claude's mistress and later his wife, feels toward his art, appears early in L'Œuvre, as her fear of the new, crude style that he has developed. Fear quickly becomes jealousy, and jealousy becomes an obsession. Christine satisfies Claude — her "big childish artist" — by posing for the nude figure in his panorama; her rage grows as she realizes that the painter loves her less than he does the painting. Forced to choose between his wife and his work, Claude foreswears art — the choice is too much for him. He awakes in Christine's embrace, extricates himself from what he feels are chains of flesh, and hangs himself before his painting. The child Christine has borne him, mentally deficient and physically diseased, is dead; his panorama is a "superb abortion." Pierre Sandoz's judgment of Claude is revelatory: "Il a avoué son impuissance et il s'est tué." Impuissance possesses its full value: it means not only "inability," but "impotence" in the physiological sense. The artist confronts his material as the self confronts reality; he also undertakes artistic activity as he undertakes the performance of the sexual act. This is an aspect of the Romantic image of the artist which I have tried to indicate in the course of the preceding chapters. Hugo's metaphors of sexuality are clear: the poet, like the Satyr, is literally the lover of nature; the visionary poet is the lover of Isis, of that universal mystery which also appears in the shape of a woman. Balzac simply identified artistic creativity with male sexual prowess: were we to push our investigation far enough, we might find more than the magician's staff in that elaborate cane so important to Balzac and so fascinating to Delphine Gay. Vigny characteristically eluded the full force of the problem: it was the muse of contemplation that became the source of pleasure for him; he identified pensée and volupté. Flaubert's images for the creative process were sexual images: the artist at work was "a jouteur who feels his sperm rising in 2 3 2

The Fate of Icarus preparation for an emission." He congratulated Zola on XJne Page d?amour by writing, "You are a male." With Flaubert, the sexual image for the creative experience became masturbation, and Baudelaire all but adopted the same image in his theory of the narcissistic dandy. For Baudelaire, art tended to become a true substitute for sexual experience. In his poems, the artist approaches the woman as if she were an unformed object and transforms her into the work of art. The limits of this substitution of art for sexual experience were reached by Jean Cocteau, who pushed the image of the narcissistic poet even beyond the Jungians' absurd theories of "creative masturbation." Cocteau noted that the artist satisfies his creative urges in art, as a sort of autoerotic incest; his sexual experiences themselves have therefore to be homosexual: Art is born of the coitus between the masculine element and the feminine element of which we are all composed, in finer balance in the artist than in other men. The result is a sort of incest, a union of one's self with one's self, a parthenogenesis. That is what makes marriage so dangerous for artists, for whom it represents a pleonasm, a monster's attempt to approach the norm. The sign of "sad case," under which so many geniuses live, is a result of the fact that the instinct of creation, satisfied elsewhere, leaves the sexual pleasure free to exercise itself in the pure domain of aesthetics and carries it also toward infecund forms.* * Either Cocteau was adapting the ideas of the Jungians, or he and the analytic psychologists had a common source. Dr. Beatrice M . Hinkle, the first translator of Jung's Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, wrote in her Re-creating of the Individual ( N e w York, 1923), ". . . the production of an art work is preceded b y what can be called a psychic coitus between the puer aeternus and the soul," i.e., between the masculine and feminine components of the personality. This is, she adds, "at one and the same time a sort of symbolic incest relation and an autoerotic process" (pp. 349-350). T h e concept of "creative masturbation" is developed even more fully than b y Jung himself, in Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, tr. R. F . C. Hull ( N e w York, 1954), pp. 207-210. Jungian discussions of art and the artist are generally restatements of the most outrageous of the Romantic theories: inspiration, the curse of genius, and so forth.

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ICARUS Cocteau was obviously justifying himself; he was at least more honest than were the Decadents, with their vague hints about the artist's "hermaphroditism." The Decadent artist was an impuissant, the fallen Icarus in another light. The dream of flying, Freud has said, represents the longing to be a man in the sexual sense; the rebellious son wants to equal and to surpass his father in sexual prowess. The artist who, like Hugo and Balzac, announces that, "J'ai des ailes. J'aspire au faîte;/ Mon vol est sûr," is claiming that he is literally a man. The artist who, like Mallarmé, portrays his "deux ailes sans plume," suggests sterility in more than the figurative sense.12 — 3— Although L'Œuvre concentrates these themes and summarizes various Romantic ideas about the artist, although Claude Lantier dies leaving no name behind him — thus fulfilling the fear Baudelaire expressed in "Les Plaintes d'un Icare" — Zola's novel still does not reach the ultimate point of the Decadence. As Baudelaire's career indicates, the fallen Icarus tends in a sense to regress and to become Narcissus. He resolves the dichotomy of poetry and personality by transforming his life itself into a work of art. Icarus' exhibitionism becomes pure masturbatory activity. "I am so glad," says Lord Henry Wotton to Dorian Gray, "that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself. Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets." * In writing these words, Oscar Wilde was placing * Wilde's study of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, "Pen, Pencil and Poison," is an attempt to see the life of the poet-poisoner as an actual example of the Decadent existence described in Dorian Gray. Wainewright realized, wrote Wilde, that "life itself is an art, and has its modes of style no less than the arts that seek to express it" (Essays, p. 77). Wilde took the title of his essay from Swinburne, and through Swinburne one may trace the art of evil to Baudelaire. But another of his sources was an article by De

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T h e Fate of Icarus himself in the French tradition, adopting a French image which had a long history.13 While Balzac was criticizing the weak-willed "artist in partibus," the man of poetry who could not be a poet, Gautier, that herald of the Decadence, created the first image of the self-amusing dilettante as ideal type, Mademoiselle de Maupin. His hero d'Albert was the direct ancestor of the Decadent dilettante: Baudelaire's dandy alone stood between them. D'Albert was already the unproductive artist, a man with an imagination so active that he could not concentrate it on a work of art: I can't stop my brain, and that makes all the difference between a talented man and a genius; it is a continuous seething, wave pushes wave; I can't master that sort of internal jet that rises from my heart to my head, and that drowns all my thoughts for want of a way out.14 That is the side of d'Albert which corresponded to the Romantic notions of the poetry of the heart and the beauty of the ineffable. Even Vigny sometimes felt that unheard melodies are sweetest.* There was another side to d'Albert, the tendency to turn his life into a work of art. His sweetheart Rosette informed Mademoiselle de Maupin: His poetry is beneath him, and it doesn't contain him. Judging by what he has done, one would get a false impression of his person; his true poem is himself, and I don't know if he will ever create another.15 Quincey — which should suggest De Quincey's series of "lectures" entitled "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" (1827, 1839, 1854). Certain elements of the Decadent art of the eighteen-nineties in England may thus be traced to English Romanticism itself. * Cf. Mario Praz's somewhat extreme position on this question (in La Came, la morte, e il diavolo nella letteratura romarmca, 3rd ed., Florence, 1948, p. 17): "The Romantic exalts the artist who does not give material form to his dreams, the poet ecstatic before the eternally white page, the musician who listens to the prodigious harmonies of his mind without trying to translate them into notes. It is Romantic to consider concrete expression as a decadence, a contamination." 2

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ICARUS Lord Henry Wotton said little more of Dorian Gray, but Wilde was not copying Mademoiselle de Maupin. His model was the yellow-backed novel in which Dorian discovered the theory of the New Hedonism, Huysmans' A rebours. Jean Floressas des Esseintes is the epitome of the Decadence. In him, Huysmans portrayed the sickly Icarus carried to the limit of his development — or more appropriately, of his degeneration. Like Charles Demailly and Naz de Coriolis, des Esseintes is the frail descendant of two worn-out families, the product of several centuries of inbreeding: "a frail young man of thirty, anemic and high-strung, with hollow cheeks, steel-blue eyes, a prominent but straight nose, dry and delicate hands." 16 His appearance is merely a reflection of his soul, also an anemic and delicate entity. Des Esseintes, like Baudelaire and his imitators, has accepted the concept of the Decadence as a positive value. His favorite literature is Silver Latin and the poetry of the poètes maudits. Sick of the ways of modern society, he is "ripe for isolation, harassed by life, expecting nothing more from it," 1 7 and he follows the Parnassians into the Ivory Tower — or into Axel's Castle, that Decadent equivalent of the Ivory Tower, in which Symbolist magic and suggestion replaced Parnassian concentration. Once in his private château, des Esseintes does not devote himself to creation, to art in the true sense. He escapes the necessity of confronting nature by arranging his milieu to suit himself: he turns his life into a poem. "Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end," Pater had written, and Wilde would adopt the dictum for his New Hedonism. Des Esseintes develops the same philosophy: he dabbles in experiences that range from the innocuous to the perverse, simply for their own sake. The finest example is perhaps the "mouth-organ," the set of tiny casks with which Huysmans' hero plays "melodies" — since he accepts Baudelaire's theory of correspondences — on his tongue. The creative mind does 236

The Fate of Icarus not even come into play: des Esseintes exists in his nerveendings. The only possible image for such an aesthetic experience is masturbation: all true creativity disappears. In the process of aestheticizing life, des Esseintes finally destroys life: the tortoise he has ornamented with mosaics of gems dies under the weight of its own artificiality. Des Esseintes succeeds only in ruining his own health completely, in bringing himself to the choice indicated by Barbey d'Aurevilly, between the mouth of a pistol and the foot of the cross.* Huysmans himself chose the latter, but he chose for himself alone. The various imitations of A rebours — particularly Wilde's Dorian Gray and d'Annunzio's II Piacere — end with the same dilemma. Both Dorian and Andrea Sperelli choose death; or, at least, the authors chose death for their heroes. Wilde himself, having tried to live according to his theories, ended in scandal, despair, and an early death. The ink into which the Green Carnation was dipped effectively killed the flower. But there was another flower that did not die so easily, the Blue Hortensia, the attribute of the man who had stood as a model for des Esseintes, count Robert de Montesquiou. Montesquiou was, if not a Decadent hero in the flesh, a complete dilettante. He struck the pose of the bright-winged Icarus and said, according to Ernest Raynaud, "I should like admiration for me to turn into physical desire." After Hugo's soaring eagle, Lamartine's majestic dying swan, Baudelaire's albatross, came Montesquiou's peacock, the small-brained bird with beautiful feathers: it was as the Paon that Rostand admitted Montesquiou to the farmyard of Chantecler. Montesquiou was a dabbler. He wrote terrible poetry, criticism of painting which was even more impressionistic than Pater's. * Barbey tionnel, July 1902. W h a t judgment on

d'Aurevilly's review of the novel appeared in the Constitu28, 1884, and was republished in Le Roman contemporain in is most interesting is that the critic had rendered the same Baudelaire, on two occasions (Poésie et poètes, pp. 110, 123).

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ICARUS Unlike the heroes of A rebours, Dorian Gray and II Piacere, and unlike Wilde, he lived on, gradually losing what reputation he had, until 1921. He was, if anyone ever was, a vestal in the temple of art, or — to use the phrase coined by Proust, who began his career as Montesquiou's disciple — a "celibate of art." 18 —4— To mention Proust is to remind ourselves that in spite of the gallery of Claude Lantiers and des Esseintes, of Montesquious and Wildes, the last decades of the nineteenth century saw various other attempts to resolve the Romantic dilemma of poetry and personality which Baudelaire had phrased so acutely and under which the Decadent artist had apparently foundered. Before Proust created one of the last major statements of the Romantic faith in art, in A la recherche du temps perdu, two poets, Rimbaud and Mallarmé, had attempted contrary resolutions of that Romantic dilemma. What Rimbaud attempted was first of all a revival of the Romantic spirit as it had been understood by the first generation of Romanticism. His nod to the Parnassian cult of antiquity, the poem variously entitled "Soleil et chair" and "Credo in unam," expressed an attitude which differed both from Baudelaire's regrets for the world before the Fall and from Leconte de Lisle's nostalgia for the reign of an Apollonian goddess of beauty: Je regrette les temps de la grande Cybèle Qu'on disait parcourir, gigantesquement belle, Sur un grand char d'airain, les splendides cités; Son double sein versait dans les immensités Le pur ruissellement de la vie infinie. L'Homme suçait, heureux, sa mamelle bénie, Comme un petit enfant, jouant sur ses genoux.

The image is clearly not that of Leconte de Lisle's Vénus de Milo — 238

The Fate of Icarus Marbre sacré, vêtu de force et de génie, Déesse irrésistible au port victorieux, Pure comme un éclair et comme une harmonie, O Vénus, ô beauté, blanche mère des Dieux! — or Baudelaire's "White Goddess," the terrible muse who emasculates her enchanted lovers. Rimbaud's Cybèle rather recalls Hugo's symbol for nature, the enormously fertile cow that gives the milk of strength and knowledge. It was not by accident that Rimbaud sent his poem to Banville, the greatest hugolâtre of them all. Rimbaud, as the "Lettre du voyant" indicates, thought of himself as a direct descendant of certain Romantics and Parnassians whom he called "the second Romantics."19 Yet Rimbaud's theories and adventures seem to be almost a conscious parody, a high-speed burlesque of the misadventures of Romanticism, the flight and fall of Icarus. He did not carry the pose of Satan-Prometheus as far as Lautréamont did: while the unfortunate Isidore Ducasse paraded perversion as a way of life and symbolized the poet's sexual union with the universe as sodomy, Rimbaud tried to revive the Hugolian myth of union with the earth, with the goddess of nature. The experiment is most clearly stated in the prosepoem "Aube": the poet strips away the veils of the DawnGoddess and possesses her. This sexual possession symbolized for Rimbaud the triumph of the personality over nature, the transformation of the external world by the processes of perception. He tried to make the act of perception truly an active experience. The senses were more than faculties for passive reception; the perceiver changed the world by perceiving it. The end of such an experience was the elevation of the poet to the grade of leader of men, Prometheus, "thief of fire," and Orpheus, "multiplier of progress." Rimbaud wanted to revive the estate of poetry in ancient Greece, to achieve a poetic statement which would be a song of action.20

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ICARUS The discipline by which the poet was to prepare himself for such an adventure was, however, not a discipline at all. It was that old Romantic bugaboo, disorder: T h e Poet becomes a seer through a long, immense and calculated disordering of all the senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he seeks himself, he consumes within himself all poisons, so as to retain only their quintessence.21

The supreme savant, Prometheus, was the same as the great criminal, the "grand maudit" Satan. Rimbaud discovered — he repeated the discovery several times, each time following it by a new attempt — that the disordered personality becomes its own obstacle. It is this discovery that distinguishes "Le Bateau ivre," with its dying fall, from the theoretical "Lettre du voyant." Beyond a given point, the poet can no longer control his disordered senses: the assertion of personality and masculinity through every act of perception gets out of hand, and Prometheus-Satan finds himself the victim of his own hallucinations. The drunken boat, having been vanquished by the sea of imagination and nature, wishes either for destruction — " O que ma quille éclate! O que j'aille à la mer! " 2 2 — or for a state of absolute passivity, the tiny mud puddle in which a child sails a paper boat. Rimbaud presented the record of his experience in Une Saison en enfer. Whether or not it was really a farewell to literature, this cycle of prose poems is phrased as if it were to be the author's last production. The poet presents himself as an adolescent Satan, a Barbarian, the "Infernal Spouse" of a foolish virgin. He recapitulates his attempt to disorder his senses: "I finally came to believe that the disorder of my mind was sacred"; and explains his dangerous proximity to madness: M y health was endangered. I felt the approach of terror. I fell into sleeps which lasted several days, and, awake again, I continued

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T h e Fate of Icarus the saddest of dreams. I was ripe for death, and by a dangerous route my weakness was leading me to the limits of the world and of Cimmeria, land of shadows and of whirlwinds. But, he continues, "That's done with, now. Today I know how to greet beauty." Beauty is not to be found in poetry. In one of his sketches for the Saison, Rimbaud wrote, " N o w I can say that art is foolishness." He revealed the true goal of his discipline of disorder: it was not the creation of a work of art, but the winning of power in the world. In other words, Rimbaud preferred personality to poetry. The Saison concludes with the preparations for a triumphal march into the "splendid cities," which are the cities of the real world, not the artificial paradise of Byzantium. The protagonist of the poem escapes from the Hell of his own disordered personality into positive action.23 As Edmund Wilson said, it is dangerous to regard Rimbaud's life as an archetypal experience; but that life, like the Saison en enfer, did seem to indicate a possible means to the solution of the Romantic dilemma. Rimbaud, in his departure for a life of action, paved the way for Gide, who would turn from the image of a Decadent Narcissus to the activist hero Theseus, and, after Gide, for the école de VHomrne of the twentieth century.24 If Rimbaud elevated personality above poetry, life and action above art, Mallarmé did the contrary. His thought continued and purified the theories of language and poetry developed by Gautier and Baudelaire. Mallarmé, like most nineteenth-century French poets, began his career by imitating Hugo, but he quickly took a stand quite different from that of le Père. In "L'Art pour tous" he proclaimed that art is a mystery which must be jealously guarded from the vulgar crowd, that the poet is both an aristocrat and an initiate into the rites of art. He wrote to Cazalis, criticizing the theory of art's immediate social utility which Hugo propounded in

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ICARUS William Shakespeare: "Fortunate Venus of Milo, you have no arms, such a blasphemy couldn't be addressed to you!" Life, he wrote in "Les Fenêtres," was a gloomy hospital from which he wanted to escape. Like Baudelaire, he sought his image, transformed into a thing of beauty, in art and supernaturalism: Je me mire et me vois ange! et je meurs, et j'aime — Que la vitre soit l'art, soit la mysticité — A renaître, portant mon rêve en diadème, Au ciel anterieur oùfleuritla Beauté! He described himself as a Parnassian artist in "Las de l'amer repos," in the guise of a Chinese enamelist, painting on a hollow cup a landscape that was not a landscape, the natural world chastened and transformed into a few lines of color. But Mallarmé carried the Parnassian experiment farther than any of his contemporaries. All Parnassianism had been an attempt to escape from life into the realm of pure intelligence. Mallarmé "impersonalized" himself completely and wrote to Cazalis in 1867: ". . . my Thought has thought itself and has arrived at a Pure Conception." The result, he said, was a kind of death: only by staring into the Venetian mirror on his desk could he convince himself that he still existed. The mirror of Narcissus was two things for Mallarmé, the real mirror which reassured him of his being alive and the ideal mirror of his own consciousness, which reflected only itself.25 The striking feature of Mallarmé's "impersonalization" was the plague of the Decadent artist, the conviction of sterility. Mallarmé was the swan frozen in a lake of ice, the cold virgin Hérodiade, who lived in front of her mirror and saved her virginity for herself. He was the nurse of "Ouverture ancienne" who witnessed the death-like trance of Hérodiade and could only sing a lamentation and a prophecy of the princess's death, "Fatidique, vaincu, monotone, lassé . . ." 28

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The Fate of Icarus He was also the Faun who played a single melodic line on his flute and lived alone with his memories. "L'Après-midi d'un faune" also indicates the other side of Mallarmé, the fascination with "l'azur" — with spontaneity of emotion and inspiration, with the possibility of accepting nature as the earlier Romantics had accepted it. The experience recorded in this Decadent eclogue ends in failure: having made poetry the denial of the external reality, since the naming of an object entailed the virtual destruction of that object and its transformation into a concept, Mallarmé was unable to reconstruct the natural world. His Faun, like Frédéric Moreau or Laforgue's Hamlet, is afraid. While Hugo's Satyr sang the earth itself in all its fullness and made indecent propositions to Venus, Mallarmé's Faun sings the pure line of the horizon and recoils from the blasphemous thought of possessing the goddess. At the conclusion of the poem, he turns his consciousness upon itself and retires into dream and memory. Valéry's Young Fate and M. Teste would imitate Mallarmé's Faun. Nevertheless, Mallarmé believed that he was invested with an Orphic mission. His poems were not merely frivolous, though he adopted Banville's verbal fireworks and plays on words: they were to constitute "the Work. The Great Work, as our ancestors, the alchemists, called it." * The book which Mallarmé always hoped to write was to be a grimoire, a book of spells and incantations comprising "the Orphic explanation of the Earth." He extended Baudelaire's theories of the magic inherent in language — which Hugo had barely suggested in saying that the universe was a poem written by God. Poetry, Mallarmé wrote in 1884, is "the expression, by human language restored to its essential rhythm, of the * The alchemists did indeed call it the Grand Œuvre, for which the only adequate English translation would be "the philosopher's stone." But Mallarmé is, of course, playing on the ambiguities of the word œuvre.

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ICARUS mysterious meaning of the aspects of existence: thus it grants authenticity to our life on earth and constitutes the sole spiritual task." His frivolity was a kind of Romantic irony, since human language could never really contain these mysteries perceived by the mind. He wrote to Verlaine that he would never produce more than fragments of the "Great Work"; all he could hope to do was to demonstrate that he had glimpsed a reality to which he was unable to give concrete form. The significant fact about Mallarmé's Livre and his conception of the Orphic mission was that both were to be purely spiritual. Mallarmé had no intention of following Hugo into the tribune; he did not even want to contribute ideas, as Vigny did. Le Maître, Mallarmé's Orphic ideal, plays his part in the course of events of the universe itself, not in the march of human progress. He does not want to abolish tyranny or to teach men new philosophies; he wants to abolish chance, to create a necessity. Vigny's Captain hurls into the sea of the multitudes a bottle containing his ideas; Mallarmé's Maître — as well as his Igitur — hazards a roll of the dice to abolish chance. The roll of the dice is, as Mallarmé explains, the act of thought. The attempt will fail — "un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard"; but the act of thought produces the one necessity man can produce, the work of art, which lasts in the midst of the universal holocaust. Poetry, for Mallarmé, possessed a value superior to that of personality. Each of his poems contains the justification of its own existence. The mirror in the "sonnet en x" ("Ses purs ongles très haut dédiant leur onyx . . .") reflects not the face of a neurotic Narcissus, but the constellation which seems to have some meaning in itself, which seems to reveal a fragment of the universal mystery. In a sense, Mallarmé agrees with Chatterton: the poet reads the route indicated in the stars. The difference between Mallarmé's ideas and those of the early Romantics should be clear. Chatterton, the complete Roman2

44

T h e Fate of Icarus tic poet, was still trying to assert his personality. Mallarmé insisted on the impersonality of the poet: only the disembodied intelligence functions in the spiritual adventure.27 Proust's way, the third attempt to solve the Romantic dilemma, lies between Rimbaud's affirmation of the personality and Mallarmé's rejection of it. If we read A la recherche du temps perdu in a certain light, we see that it is in the line of Rousseau's Confessions. Proust defined the narcissistic attitude, the attentive examination of the deepest levels of the self, as the true prerogative of the artist. He defined "the artistic sense" as the "submission to internal reality," the only true reality: " . . . at every moment the artist must listen to his instinct: this makes art the most real of things, the most austere school of life, and the true Last Judgment." Proust's novel is of course not merely another confession in the manner of Rousseau. The artist must do more than exhibit himself to the public. He must transform his life of sensation and instinct into a work of art, and not as the Decadent, Robert de Montesquiou or Jean Floressas des Esseintes, accomplished this feat. Proust rejected the attitude of the celibates of art, the dilettantes who use art as masturbatory self-amusement, who "extract nothing from their impressions, grow old — useless and unsatisfied." Only through the discovery of the artist's true vocation, "to create a work of art," could the lost time of dilettantism and inutility be redeemed. Proust rediscovered the cult of art in its finest form, the ritual in which the work of art is the offering that assures the artist's salvation. This was the faith of Flaubert; it was the faith that Baudelaire expressed, in his usual attitude of self-torture, in "Le Mauvais Moine": O moine fainéant! quand saurai-je donc faire Du spectacle vivant de ma triste misère Le travail de mes mains et l'amour de mes yeux? 2

45

ICARUS The artist constructs the work of art from his life — he must construct the work of art. Only through art, Proust affirmed, could narcissism be transcended: "Only through art are we able to get out of ourselves, to know what another sees of this universe which is not the same as ours, and of which the landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown to us as those there may be on the moon." Yet the transcendence of the reader's or the spectator's narcissism is at the same time the triumph of the artist's personality. The man who reads a book or looks at a painting gradually accepts the world as the artist has seen it, and in turn sees the world as the artist has expressed it: "Women pass in the street, different from those in the past, since they are Renoirs, those Renoirs in which we formerly refused to see women." The artist becomes a demiurge and creates the world anew, shaping it in accord with his own vision.28 As Joyce, whose method of creating a work of art out of his life closely resembled Proust's way, would have it, Icarus, the young exhibitionist, may become Daedalus, the fabulous artificer who left the labyrinth as a monument to his creative genius. Proust and Joyce reaffirmed Horace's cry of triumph, "Exegi monumentum aere perennius," as the essential cry of the artist. The true fate of the adolescent Icarus may simply be to grow up.

T o say that Rimbaud or Mallarmé or Proust solved the Romantic dilemma, the cleavage between poetry and personality, art and life, would demand a voluntary ignorance of both the lives they led and the poetry they produced. All three attempts were forms of self-destruction, in that they denied expression to some portion of the self. Proust, who came closest to ensuring the Romantic assertion of personality and the creation of a durable aesthetic monument at once, was a life-denying artist in the tradition of Flaubert and

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T h e Fate of Icarus Baudelaire. As the Romantic image of the artist is ultimately an unrealizable megalomaniac ideal of personal omnipotence, so the Romantic dichotomy of poetry and personality is irreconcilable. The self can never impose its form on the world, either through the relationship of immediacy that Hugo and Balzac sought, or through the magical processes of thought and art which compose the aesthetic of Flaubert and Baudelaire. Neither pure thought nor art can ever become a substitute for life: Vigny's Ivory Tower, like Huysmans' palace of art, is an unsatisfactory alternative to the world of common human experience. And life which denies the value of art, the logical result of Rimbaud's farewell to poetry, is, for many of us, inconceivable. Yet to follow Maurras and Daudet, Eliot, Babbitt, and Hulme, to dismiss Romanticism as stupid or naive, is to take upon one's self the burden of a presumptuousness that far exceeds the megalomania of the Romantics. We cannot elude the Romantic dilemma by rejecting its validity. The two poles of nineteenth-century art and thought, Romanticism and Realism, reflect those other apparently irreconcilable dichotomies, spontaneity and irony, the self and the world, Freud's principles of pleasure and reality, and ultimately, perhaps, the dichotomy of freedom and necessity. The dilemma of personality and poetry is the problem anyone faces as he tries to comprehend reality and to give form to his impressions. As such, it is not limited to Romanticism, which merely translated this general problem into that of the artist, which saw in art a possible solution to the difficulties of man's condition. Even if we reject the various interpretations of the basic tenets of the Romantic ethic proposed by the successive generations of the nineteenth century, we may still admire the art that Romanticism produced. We may even prefer Philippe Desportes's interpretation of the myth of Icarus to that of Baudelaire and— while not forgetting the hero's fall into the sea — express our admiration for his flight.

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Notes on the Illustrations Notes Index

Notes on the Illustrations A study of the graphic artists' presentation of the Romantic image of the artist could probably fill a volume of its own; I should like simply to indicate the ways in which nineteenth-century paintings and illustrations parallel the images to be found in the literature of the period. Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun's portrait of Madame de Staël as Corinne is that of the perfect enthusiast: eyes rapt in her contemplation of the ideal, the inspired poetess strums her lyre as she improvises a sonorous ode. In the imaginary portrait of the Neveu de Rameau, the frontispiece to the first French edition of Diderot's book (1821), another sort of enthusiasm — revolutionary fervor — appears. The streaming hair, the raging eye, the revolutionary headgear are all the invention of the illustrator: Diderot's Neveu may be an enthusiast, but he is not quite that disordered. Delacroix's 1827 painting of Tasso in the madhouse was one of several paintings and sketches the artist did of the suffering poet. All contained the same elements: the distracted poet, the heckling mob, the meager cot, the manuscripts scattered on the floor. They are among Romanticism's finest tributes to the "martyred poet." The vignette by the popular Romantic illustrator, Tony Johannot, appeared immediately below the banner in the first number of L'Artiste and in various numbers thereafter. All the major arts are represented: poetry, sculpture, painting, and music, both vocal and instrumental. The musician holds a lute, Romanticism's answer to the classical lyre. The caricature of Hugo — one peared in 1843, on the occasion and a comet did appear over Paris — his front de génie — is grossly

of many drawn by Daumier — apof the failure of Les Burgraves — that same year. The poet's forehead exaggerated.

The painter and the violinist in Daumier's "Le bois est cher et les arts ne vont pas" (1833) are dancing to keep warm. The plates on the 25 1

floor provide silent commentary. Like Balzac, Daumier often treated the struggling artist with both sympathy and a certain comic detachment. Like Balzac again, Daumier refused to give the upper hand to the artist in that long-lasting struggle between l'artiste and le bourgeois. In "Les Crétins!" (1865) neither the unappreciative laymen nor the disgruntled painter come off too well. Gustave Moreau, "Les Plaintes du poète," a sketch for an enamel which was never completed. The Byzantine muse, covered with gems, an ornate lyre behind her, recalls the bejewelled sterile women of Baudelaire, the heroines of Salammbô and Hérodiade. The poet himself is that languorous, hermaphroditic figure characteristic of the Decadence.

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Notes In notes including citations for a number of direct quotations within a paragraph, each citation is identified by the last word, or words, of the quoted passage. Chapter I. The Romantic Image of the Artist 1. Saint-Chéron, "De la position sociale des artistes," L'Artiste, IV (1832), 50. 2. Charles de Bernard, Gerfaut (Paris, 1870), p. 73. 3. The following discussion is based primarily on study of the entries under the words "art," "artisan," and "artiste" in the various dictionaries of the Académie Française (first through eighth editions, 1694-1935), including the Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, vol. III (Paris, 1888) and the Supplément au dictionnaire de VAcadémie Française (Paris, 1836); and in Oscar Bloch and W . von Wartburg, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue française (Paris, 1950); Fernand Brunot, Histoire de la langue française des origines à 1900 (Paris, 1905-1953); Rändle Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, reproduced from the first edition, London, 1611 (Columbia, South Carolina, 1950); Albert Dauzat, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue française (Paris, 1954); Dictionnaire du bas-langage ou des manières de parler usitées parmi le peuple (Paris, 1808); Dictionnaire universel (2nd ed., rev. Basnage de Bauval, The Hague and Rotterdam, 1701); Dictionnaire universel françois et latin, vulgairement appelé Dictionnaire de Trévoux (Paris, 1732); Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. I (Paris, 1751); Leopold Favre, ed., Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, conditum a Carolo du Fresne, domino du Cange, vol. I (Paris, 1937); Edmond Huguet, Dictionnaire de la langue française du seizième siècle, vol. I (Paris, 1925); Émile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française (Paris, 1885); L. S. Mercier, Néologie, ou vocabulaire de mots nouveaux, à renouveler, ou pris dans des acceptions nouvelles (Paris, 1801); Paul Robert, Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française, vol. I (Paris, 1951); Charles Toubin, Dictionnaire étymologique et explicatif de la langue française et spécialement du langage populaire (Paris, 1876); Walther von Wartburg, Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, vol. I (Bonn, 1928); Bartina Harmina Wind, Les Mots italiens introduits en français 25 3

Notes to Chapter I au XVIe siècle (Deventer, 1928). I have not indicated specific references to these various dictionaries in the notes which follow. 4. T h e Académie Française did not accept the term beaux-arts until 1798, in the fifth edition of its dictionary. 5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Pygmalion, in Suite du répertoire du Théâtre Français: Drames en prose, I (Paris, 1822), 7. 6. Denis Diderot, Salon de 1763, in Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1876), X, 199; "Pensées détachées," Œuvres, XII, 101; Salon de 1161, Œuvres, XI, 7. 7. Rodriguez and Halévy, in Saint-Simon et al., Opinions littéraires, philosophiques et industrielles (Paris, 1825), p. 331, note 1. 8. Aux artistes (Paris, 1830), p. j. 9. Jules Janin, "Etre artiste," L'Artiste, I (1831), 9, 10. George Sand, Lettres d'un voyageur (letter of April 26, 1836, to Everard), quoted in Raymond Leslie Evans, Les Romantiques français et la musique (Paris, 1934), p. 1x9. Balzac, Un Prince de la bohème (1840), in La Comédie humaine, ed. Marcel Bouteron (Paris, 10 vols.), VI, 847. Gautier, Histoire du romantisme (Paris, 1874), p. 219. 10. Diderot, Salon de 1763, Œuvres, X, 199. Mme de Staël, De l'Allemagne, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1814), I, 236. Hugo, Correspondance (Paris, 1947 . . . ), I, 439 (letter to Louis Pavie, Jan. 15, 1827). 11. Leconte de Lisle, "Discours sur Victor Hugo," in Derniers Poèmes (Paris, 1899), p. 293. Ferdinand Brunetière, L'Évolution de la poésie lyrique en France au dix-neuvième siècle, 4th ed. (Paris, 1905), II, 194. Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, ed. Rolland de Renéville and Jules Mouquet (Paris, 1951), p. 257. 12. Vigny, Œuvres complètes, ed. F. Baldensperger (Paris, 1950), II, 1344 (the passage, from the Journal d'un poete, is dated June 29, 1858; Vigny attributes the phrase to the critic Hippolyte Babou). 13. Chénier, Œuvres complètes, ed. Gérard Walter (Paris, n.d.), P- 45714. La Fontaine, in his poetic discourse on reception to the Académie, May 2, 1684. 15. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, s.v. "Philosophe," in Œuvres complètes, XIX (Paris, 1879), 196. "visceral emotion": ibid., s.v. "Enthousiasme," in Œuvres, XVIII (Paris, 1878), 552. 16. On Diderot's position in the debate on poetic genius, see Herbert Dieckmann, "Diderot's Conception of Genius," Journal of the History of Ideas, II (1941), 151-182; Margaret Gilman, "The Poet according to Diderot," Romanic Review, XXXVII (1946), 37-54; and Miss Gilman's book, The Idea of Poetry, esp. pp. 48-85. Daniel Mornet, "Le Romantisme avant les romantiques," in Le Romantisme et les lettres (Paris, 1929), p. 64.

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Romantic Image of the Artist 17. Joubert, Les Carnets, ed. André Beaunier (Paris, 1938), I, 146 (text dated 1797). 18. Ibid., I, 327 (text dated March 19, 1802). 19. Jacques Delille, L'Imagination (Paris, 1806), II, 205-206 (according to the introductory notes by J. Esménard, the poem was written between 1785 and 1794). 20. Baour-Lormian, Le Classique et le romantique (Paris, 1825), pp. 40-41, the note which begins, "L'inspiration est la colonne sur laquelle s'appuie tout l'édifice du romantisme." Charles Loyson, Lycée français, IV (1820), 51-60. 21. Cahuzac, "Enthousiasme" (signed: B), in Encyclopédie, V (Paris, 1755), 719-722. Diderot, Œuvres romanesques, ed. Henri Bénac (Paris, n.d.), p. 468. 22. Mme de Staël, Corinne, ou l'Italie (Paris, 1807), I, 128. 23. De l'Allemagne, I, 269. 24. child of nature: Chateaubriand, Œuvres complètes (Paris, n.d.), I, 389. at his disposition: Fernand Baldensperger, Le Mouvement des idées dans l'émigration française (Paris, 1924), I, 277 (Chênedollé's report, describing an evening spent with Rivarol in Hamburg, on Sept. 5, 1795, is quoted in toto). 25. On the genre troubadour, see Fernand Baldensperger, "Le Genre troubadour," in Études d'histoire littéraire (Paris, 1907), pp. 110-146; Henri Jacoubet, Le Genre troubadour et les origines françaises du romantisme (Paris, 1929). 26. Paul van Tieghem, Ossian en France (Paris, 1917), I, 200-201 (the translations appeared in the Journal étranger, 1758, and the Gazette littéraire, Oct. 1, 1764). 27. Victor Hugo, "Les Derniers Bardes," in Recueil des jeux floraux de l'Académie de Toulouse (1819), Conservateur littéraire (March 1820), Odes et poésies diverses (1822). 28. Fontanes, Œuvres (Paris, 1859), passim-, esp. "Le Chant du barde," I, 389-396 (the poem is dated 1783; it is a monologue, spoken by Ossian, who expresses a quaint desire to return to his home in the snow-covered hills of Scotland). 29. Le Chansonnier de la Montagne, ou Recueil de chansons, vaudevilles, pots-pourris et hymnes patriotiques par différents auteurs (2nd ed., Paris, An II), quoted in Philippe Le Harivel, Nicolas de Bonneville, p. 169. 30. On mystical illuminism, cf. Auguste Viatte, Les Sources occultes du romantisme (Paris, 1928, 2 vols.). On the revival of Platonism, cf. René Canat, La Renaissance de la Grèce antique ( 1820-1850) (Paris, 1911), pp. 86-87. 31. Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, ed. John S. Spink (Paris, 1948), p. 3. 2 55

Notes to Chapter I 32. Rousseau, Rousseau fuge de Jean-Jacques, in Œuvres complètes, XIII (Paris, 1834), 55. Mme de Staël, Réflexions sur le suicide, suivies de la Défense de la reine, publiée en août 1793; et de Lettres sur les écrits et le caractère de /.-/. Rousseau (Paris, 1814), p. 258. "of all creatures . . .": ibid., p. 255. 33. Mme de Staël, Corinne, II, 158. 34. Chateaubriand, Œuvres, I, 268. 35. Sénac de Meilhan, quoted in Monglond, Le Préromantisme, II, 176. 36. Corinne, I, 79, 337-339; III, 62-63. 37. De FAllemagne, II, 164-165. 38. Fontanes, Œuvres, I, 92-95 (the poem appeared anonymously in the Almanack des Muses of 1812, pp. 173-176. 39. Chênedollé, Études poétiques (Paris, 1820), p. 90 (the poem is dated 1817). 40. Chateaubriand, Génie du christianisme, ou beautés de la religion chrétienne, 2nd ed. (Paris, An X I — 1803), I, 394-395 (this note directs the reader to a second note, " N " [I, 629-630], in which Chateaubriand quotes two brief samples of Chénier's work). Latouche, "Sur la vie et les ouvrages d'André Chénier," in D. Ch. Robert, ed., Œuvres posthumes d'André Chénier (Paris, 1826), p. xx (a reprint of Latouche's introduction to the volume of 1819, almost impossible to find today). 41. Hugo, "A Gaspard de Pons," in Océan, Tas de pierres (Paris, 1942), pp. 38-39 (the poem was discovered by the editors of the Hugo papers in a small notebook the poet kept in 1816-1818; it is dated May 1821). Loyson, Lycée français, II, 166. Latouche, poem cited in Frédéric Ségu, Un Romantique républicain: H. de Latouche (Paris, 1931), pp. 240-243. 42. Frau Herder, quoted in J. G. Robertson, ed., Torquato Tasso (Manchester, 1918), p. iv. 43. by Schiller's "Kassandra": Ernest Dupuy, Alfred de Vigny, la vie et l'œuvre (Paris, 1913), pp. 118-122 (the poem had been analyzed in De l'Allemagne; Vigny might never have seen the German original). Antoni Deschamps, "Le Poëte" (Dernières Paroles, 1835), in Les Poètes français, ed. Eugène Crépet (Paris, 1862), II, 262-263. "name is blessed": Vigny, Œuvres, I, 805. 44. Chateaubriand, Correspondance générale (Paris, 1912-1924), I, 127, 152; II, 251. Gautier, "Terza Rima" (1838), in Poésies complètes (Paris, 1882), I, 307-308. 45. Cf. Albert Guérard Jr., "Prometheus and the Aeolian Lyre," The Yale Review, XXXIII (1944), 482-497. 46. Léon Daudet, Le Stupide XIXe Siècle (Paris, 1922), p. 84. 47. Cf. Mme de Staël, Lettres . . . , pp. 260-267, passim; Balzac, Illusions perdues, in Comédie humaine, IV, 1013; Baudelaire, Salon de

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Romantic Image of the Artist 1846, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec (Paris, 1951), p. 670. 48. Cf. Levin L. Schiicking, The Sociology of Literary Taste (New York, 1944), pp. i6f. 49. Balzac, "Des artistes," in Œuvres diverses, ed. Marcel Bouteron and Henri Longnon (Paris, 1935-1940), I, 353. 50. Balzac, Lettres à l'Étrangère (Paris, 1899-1950), II, 181 (letter dated July 1, 1843). Gautier, "Le Poëte et la foule" (1845), Poésies, II, 134. 51. Saint-Chéron, "De la position," p. 52. 52. Chevalier de Fourcy, "Le Poëte," in Recueil des jeux floraux de /'Académie de Toulouse, 1821, p. iv. 53. Balzac, Lettres, 1,356 (letter dated Oct. 22, 1836). 54. Heine, Lutezia, in Sämtliche Werke, IX (Leipzig, 1910), 146 (written on the occasion of Napoleon's burial in the Invalides, Jan. 1841). Gaspard de Pons, "Bonaparte et Byron" (Inspirations poétiques, 1825), in La Couronne poétique de Byron, ed. Georges Roth (Paris, n.d.), pp. 93-9J. 55. Flaubert, Correspondance (Paris, 1926-1933), II, 303 (letter dated April 8, 1851). 56. Chateaubriand, Correspondance, IV, 91 (letter dated Feb. 5, 1823). 57. Vigny, Œuvres, II, 1264 (text dated 1848). 58. George Sand, quoted in Juliette Adam, Mes Sentiments et nos idées avant 18"]0 (Paris, 1905), p. 171. 59. Ballanche, Orphée, in Œuvres (Paris, 1830), IV, 228. 60. Sainte-Beuve, Vie, poésies et pensées de Joseph Delorme (Paris, 1829), p. 38. 61. Delacroix, L'Artiste, I (1831), 49-51. 62. Musset, "Dédicace" ("La Coupe et les lèvres," 1831), in Poésies complètes, ed. Maurice Allem (Paris, 1951), p. 166. 63. Flaubert, Correspondance, IV, 165 (to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie, March 18, 1857). 64. But, for Sainte-Beuve's later apostasy, see W . M. Frohock, "The Critic and the Cult of Art: Sainte-Beuve and the Esthetic Movement," Romanic Review, XXXII, 4 (December 1941), 379-388. 65. Sainte-Beuve, "A Alfred de Vigny" (dated Nov. 1829, pub. in Les Consolations, 1830), in Poésies complètes (Paris, 1910), pp. 263265. 66. Vigny, Œuvres, II, 1058 (text dated Feb. 7, 1837). Flaubert, Mémoires d'un fou (1838), in Œuvres de jeunesse inédites (Paris, 1910), I, 527. Leconte de Lisle, "Hypatie," in Poèmes antiques (Paris, n.d.), p. 68. Mallarmé, "Hérésies artistiques: l'Art pour tous" (1862), in Œuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris, I 945)» PP- 257"2Ö°-

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Notes to Chapter I 67. Flaubert, Correspondance, III, 294 (? Aug. 14, 1853 ?). Viollet Le Duc, "Sur la mort de Charles Loyson," Lycée français, V (1820), 171. Vigny, Stello, chap. XXXVIII (the description of the "ciel d'Homère" is actually that of Ingres's enormously successful painting of 1827, "L'Apothéose d'Homère," now in the Louvre). 68. Baudelaire, "Edgar Allan Poe, sa vie et ses œuvres" (1852), in Poe, Histoires, tr. Baudelaire, ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec (Paris, 1932), p. 681. 69. Leconte de Lisle, "Le Vœu suprême" (Revue européenne, Dec. 1, 1861; reprinted in "Poèmes barbares in 1862). 70. Otto Rank, Art and Artist, tr. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York, 1932), passim, esp. pp. 27-37, 355, 371, 325-328. Mauriac, La Vie de Jean Racine (Paris, 1928), p. 4. 71. Balzac, "Des artistes," Œuvres diverses, I, 357. 72. Vigny, Œuvres, II, 903-904 (text dated 1830). 73. Gautier, Histoire du romantisme, p. 153. 74. the Icarus syndrome: see Henry A. Murray, "American Icarus," in Clinical Studies of Personality, ed. Arthur Burton and Robert E. Harris (New York, 1955), pp. 615-641; and "Notes on the Icarus Syndrome," Folia Psychiatrica, Neurologica et Neurochirurgica Neerlandica, LXI (1958), 204-208. 75. Hugo, "Le Poëte dans les révolutions" (1821), in Odes et poésies diverses, the best example: among Hugo's later poems, see esp. "Mazeppa" (Orientales), "Les Mages" and "Ibo" {Contemplations), "Le Satyre" and "Plein Ciel" (Légende des siècles), and "L'Ascension humaine" (Chansons des rues et des bois). 76. Théodore de Banville, Odes funamibulesques (Paris, 1883), p. 77. Leconte de Lisle, "In excelsis," in Poèmes barbares (Paris, n.d.), p. 237. 78. Mallarmé, "Les Fenêtres," in Œuvres, p. 33. 79. Bachelard, L'Air et les songes (Paris, 1943), p. m . 80. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Charles Demailly (Paris, 1891), p. 162. Chapter II. The Orphie Mission of Victor Hugo Unless otherwise indicated, quotations and references in this chapter are from the magisterial edition of Hugo's Œuvres complètes, edited by Paul Meurice, Gustave Simon, et alii (Paris, 1904-1952) —the socalled édition de l'Imprimerie Nationale. In each instance I shall indicate the series (Poésie, Philosophie, Théâtre, Correspondance, and the isolated volume of notes, Océan, Tas de pierres), the volume of the series, and the page. For the Légende des siècles, however, I have used

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Victor Hugo the edition by Jacques Truchet (Paris, 1950), hereinafter abbreviated as Légende. 1. Balzac, Lettres, II, 70-71 (letter dated Oct. 17, 1842, in which Balzac applied to Hugo the phrase he had used to characterize Lucien de Rubempré: "He is a great writer and a little joker"). Edmond Biré, Victor Hugo avant 1830 (Paris, 1883), Victor Hugo après 1830 (Paris, 1891), Victor Hugo après 1852 (Paris, 1894)—the results of some twenty years devoted to the systematic destruction of the Hugo legend. Henri Guillemin, Hugo et la sexualité (Paris, 1954) — a sympathetic and suggestive study of the poet's well-recorded sexual drive, which seems to have disturbed Biré as much as it did Hugo himself. 2. Poésie II, 496. 3. Hugo, "Préface de l'édition définitive" (dated Feb. 23, 1880), in Odes et ballades (Paris, n.d.), p. 1. 4. d'Annunzio, II Piacere (Milan, 1905), p. 41. 5. Lamartine, Méditations poétiques, avec commentaires, in Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1862), I, 18 (text dated 1849). 6. "identity of the poet": Océan, Tas de pierres, p. 477. " I am not you": Poésie III, 2 (dated March 1856). "les autres, homme": "Le poëme éploré se lamente . . ." (Nov. 1, 1854), in Poésie III, 28. 7. Frances Trollope, Paris and the Parisians in 183$ (London, 1836), I, 160. Heine, Lutezia, p. 45 (merciless in his criticism of Hugo, Heine dismissed Les Burgraves as "versified sauerkraut," p. 272). the title Moi-, Amédée Guiard, La Fonction du poète: étude sur Victor Hugo (Paris, 1910), p. 218. 8. Leconte de Lisle, "Victor Hugo" (Les Poètes contemporains, III), in Derniers Poèmes, p. 259. Keats, Letters, ed. Maurice Buxton Forman, 3rd ed. (London, New York, Toronto, 1947), p. 227. 9. "Ce siècle avait deux ans . . ." (June 23, 1820), in Poésie II, 15. 10. Odes et ballades, p. 2. 11. John 3:8, quoted in Hugo's review of "Éloa," in La Muse française, ed. Jules Marsan (Paris, 1907-1909), II, 249. 12. Correspondance I, 529 (dated July 25, 1833). 13. In Poésie XIII, 26-27. 14. On Hugo's probable debt to Ballanche, see M. Larroutis, "La Genèse d'un mythe: essai sur les sources du 'Satyre' de Victor Hugo," Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, LVIII (1958), 324-364. 15. "Promontorium Somnii," in Philosophie II, 309. 16. Adèle Foucher Hugo, Victor Hugo raconté par un témoin de sa vie (Paris, 1868), I, 339. 17. "L'Enrôleur politique" (1819), in Le Conservateur littéraire, ed. Jules Marsan (Paris, 1922-1938), I (1), 3-10. 18. Poésie I, 37-40. 2 59

Notes to Chaper II 19. "century to judgment": Poésie I, 35. "for future societies": ibid., p. 7. "de victoire": "Fin" (1828), in Poésie I, 172. 20. "can calm it": Muse française, I, 27; his father's sword: " A mon Père" (1823), in Poésie I, 105-108. "je n'étais poète": "Mon Enfance" (1823), in Poésie I, 252-255. 21. Poésie I, 175-178. 22. Poésie II, 127-128 (poem dated Nov. 1831). 23. Olinde Rodrigues and Léon Halévy, "L'Artiste, le savant," p. 347-

24. Émile Barrault, Aux artistes, p. 78. 25. Enfantin, "Enseignemens faits par le Père Suprême," in Religion saint-simonienne: morale (Paris, 1832), p. 146. "is a pulpit": preface to Lucrèce Borgia (1833), in Théâtre II, 443-444. "cure of souls": ibid. (The phrase occurs passim in Hugo's correspondence and articles.) 26. Béranger, preface to Œuvres complètes of 1833, in Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1856), I, v. "demotic language": Philosophie I, 230. "Qu'il s'appelle Homère seulement . . . ," in Océan, Tas de pierres, p. 56. the ouvriers-poètes-, cf. Correspondance I, 555-556, 583-584; II, 26; IV, 155. 27. See Biré, Victor Hugo après 1852, pp. 370-371, for a detailed account of Hugo's funeral; Biré also discusses the fact that on the occasion of Hugo's death, the city council of Paris voted to secularize l'église Sainte-Geneviève once and for all (pp. 361-365). 28. "Ymbert Galloix" (L'Europe littéraire, Dec. 1, 1833), in Philosophie I, 184. 29. Le Globe, II (May 17, 1825), 548 (an unsigned review, pub. under the title "France: Essai littéraire sur le génie poétique au XIXe siècle, par M. Artaud"), "fused in me": Océan, Tas de pierres, p. 266. common one for him: cf. Théâtre II, 8 (preface to Marion de Lorme, 1831); Correspondance I, 477 (letter to Lamartine, 1830); Philosophie I, 7 (Littérature et philosophie mêlées, 1834); Océan, Tas de pierres, p. 102; Philosophie II, 208 ( William Shakespeare, in which Hugo speaks of the 1830 revolution as a "93 littéraire"). Romanticism and socialism: Océan, Tas de pierres, p. 354. 30. "L'Ascension humaine" ( 1859), in Poésie VII, 249-262. 31. "Plein Ciel" (1859), in Légende, p. 720. 32. Poesie II, 537-54733. Vigny, Œuvres, I, 888. "its own intention": Philosophie II, 480. "but not isolation": ibid., p. 172. 34. and Civilization: Océan, Tas de pierres, p. 313. Poet of Humanity: Correspondance III, 31 (to Robert Poelher, April 30, 1867). 35. Cf. Poésie III, 68-70, 276, 305-306; VIII, 177-185; X , 287-290, 313-314; Légende, pp. 578-585. Cocteau, Opium, in Œuvres complètes (Marguerat, n.p., n.d.), X, 81 (Cocteau's aphorism condenses the

260

Victor Hugo peroration of Hugo's address to the court, Théâtre II, 374). Charles Baudouin, Psychanalyse de l'art (Paris, 1929), pp. 102-120, passim-, Psychanalyse de Victor Hugo (Geneva, n.d.), passim. 36. "Joyeuse Vie" (1853), in Poésie IV, 107. 37. Correspondance II, 73 (to Mme Victor Hugo, Feb. 26, 1852). 38. Océan, Tas de pierres, p. 267 (from a notebook Hugo kept in 1870).

39. Philosophie II, 260. 40. Philosophie II, 364. 41. Mme de Staël, De l'Allemagne, I, 318-319. 42. "Pan" (1831), in Poesie II, 124. 43. "mind of man": Philosophie I, 265. "participates in creation": "Un poète est un monde . . . ," in Légende, pp. 586-587. 44. Poésie VII, 363 (Hugo wrote the quatrain in an album de voyage he kept in 1865.) 45. "L'Église" (1859), in Poésie VII, 216. 46. Légende, p. 412. 47. Cf. Océan, Tas de pierres, pp. 120, 387; Poésie II, 252-256; 111, 255-267; IX, 251; XII, 107-109; etc.

48. "Chacun choisit un homme," in Poésie XII, 157. 49. "Suite" (1854), in Poésie III, 27. 50. the French clergy: cf. Poésie IV, 37-46, for various anticlerical poems, book of nature: "Terre et cieux," in Poésie VIII, 257-261. 51. "Religions et religion," in Poésie IX, 247. 52. "Vision" (1821) and "L'Antéchrist" (1823), in Poésie I, 83-87, 220-223.

53. "Que la musique date du XVIe siècle" (1837), in Poésie II, 640. 54. "L'Été à Coutances," in Poésie XII, 112. 55. Océan, Tas de pierres, p. 140. 56. "Clôture" (1859), in Poésie VII, 278. 57. "Tout le passé et tout l'avenir" (1854), in Légende, p. 572. 58. "Sur un portrait de sainte" (1855), in Poésie X, 59-60. 59. an active noun: Philosophie I, 247. "conquest of reality": Océan, Tas de pierres, p. 463. "aller au-delà": "Promontorium Somnii," in Philosophie II, 309. "supreme contemplation": "Contemplation suprême," in Philosophie II, 611-628. 60. "internal eye": "La Religion et la science d'accord contre l'infini," in Océan, Tas de pierres, p. 226. "of his soul": Philosophie II, 302.

61. "Horror" (1854), in Poésie III, 374. 62. The lines quoted are from the three poems: "Senior est junior," in Poésie, VII, 68; "Pleurs dans la nuit" (1854), in Poésie III, 328; and "Je suis fait d'ombre . . ." (1854), in Poésie X, 233. 63. Poésie III, 324 (dated 1853).

261

Notes to Chaper II 64. "Ibo" (1854), in Poésie III, 321-322. 65. Océan, Tas de pierres, 256. 66. Sainte-Beuve, Mes Poisons, ed. Victor Giraud (Paris, 1926), pp. 37, 38, 39, 54. Baudelaire, Œuvres, p. 1081. 67. "of his times": Preface to Les Rayons et les ombres (1840), in Poésie II, 534. "representative of everything": "Post-scriptum de ma vie," in Philosophie II, 522; cf. the essay Hugo wrote in 1866-1867, a s an introduction to a guide-book on Paris published during the Exposition Internationale of 1867, a text colored by Hugo's admiration for Voltaire (Souvenirs II, 301-344). the ocean itself: cf. "L'âme humaine est sans cesse . . ." (Poésie X, 346-349); "Fleuves et poètes" (Légende, pp. 435-436); "Toujours l'esprit avance" (Poésie XII, 290); and William Shakespeare (Philosophie II, 5-6). must be prodigious: cf. "Fin" (Poésie I, 172-173); and William Shakespeare (Philosophie II, 114-120, passim). 68. Cocteau, Œuvres, X, 21. Leconte de Lisle, Derniers Poèmes, p. 259. Chapter III. Honoré de Balzac: The Poet as Demiurge The editions of Balzac's works to which I refer most frequently in the course of this chapter are La Comédie humaine, ed. Marcel Bouteron (Paris, 10 vols.); Œuvres diverses, ed. Marcel Bouteron and Henri Longnon (Paris, 1935-1940); Lettres à l'Étrangère (Paris, 18991950); and, for Balzac's prefaces, Œuvres complètes de H. de Balzac, vol. XXII: Œuvres diverses (Paris, 1876), and L'Œuvre de Balzac, ed. Albert Béguin and Jean A. Ducourneau (Paris, 1955), XV. They will be indicated as CH, OD, Étrangère, Calmann Lévy Œuvres diverses, and L'Œuvre de Balzac, respectively. 1. Étrangère, I, 206 (dated Oct. 26, 1834). 2. OD, I, 351. 3. Cf. Paul Flat, Essais sur Balzac (Paris, 1893), p. 230, 4. La Peau de chagrin, CH, IX, 29. 5. Étrangère, II, 301-302 (dated Feb. 6, 1844). 6. Ibid., II, 101 (dated Jan. 20, 1843). 7. Étrangère, I, 206 (dated Oct. 26, 1834; Balzac told Mme Hanska that the title of his analytical study would be Essai sur les forces humaines). Félix Davin, "Introduction aux Études de mœurs au XIXe siècle" (April 27, 1835), in Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, Histoire des œuvres de H. de Balzac, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1888), esp. p. 50. 8. CH, I, 6. Bernard Palissy: cf. Balzac, Letters to His Family, ed. Walter Scott Hastings (Princeton, 1934), p. 76 (letter to his mother, June 10, 1832); and Étrangère, I, 52 (dated Oct. 9-13, 1833). 9. "Homer waged battles": "Des artistes" (1830), in OD, I, 354.

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Honoré de Balzac "actions and feelings": Le Père Goriot (1834), in CH, II, 938. fallen Icarus: Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1839-1847), in CH, V, 935-

10. Cf. Vautrin's boast to Rastignac, "I'll take over the role of Providence, I'll direct the will of God" (CH, II, 940); and Jacqueline Collin's boast to Victorin Hulot, "Monsieur, we have been replacing Destiny for forty years" (CH, VI, 460). 11. "Lettre adressée aux écrivains français du XIXe siècle" (Revue de Paris, Nov. 20, 1834), in OD, II, 654. 12. Les Souffrances de l'inventeur (1843), in CH, IV, 882. 13. On Dr. Koreff, friend to Hoffmann and bearer of various mystical gospels, see Marietta Martin, Le Docteur Koreff (Paris, 192J). 14. Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu (1831, 1837), in CH, IX, 393. 15. Hugo, Légende, p. 1037 (Dieu, part IV: "Le Vautour. Paganisme"). 16. "as societies go": Avant-propos de la Comédie humaine, in CH, I, 12. Hugo, Actes et paroles, vol. I: Avant l'exil (Paris, 1937), p. 296. "his present condition": CH, I, 12. "strengthen my self": Étrangère, I, 312 (dated March 27, 1836). 17. Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (New York, 1920), p. 326. "to be loved": the phrase occurs in this form in Balzac, Correspondance (Paris, 1876), p. 35; the text in Letters to His Family (p. 45) reads, "What do I need? ortolans, since I have only two passions: love and glory, and nothing has yet been satisfied, and nothing ever will be satisfied"; Hastings dates the letter about Aug. 15, 1821. "bring me a fortune": Letters to His Family, p. 86 (dated July 15, 1832).

18. "of common reason": Balzac, Sténie, ou les erreurs philosophiques, ed. A. Prioult (Paris, 1936), pp. 5-6. because he is exalted: ibid., p. 103. 19. "and pure feelings": "Préface de la première édition de Béatrix" (1839), in Calmann Lévy Œuvres diverses, p. 536, and L'Œuvre de Balzac, p. 319. "as they sprout": Illusions perdues (1839), in CH, IV, 873.

20. Étrangère, I, 508 (dated March 6, 1839). 21. Ibid., I, 240 (dated March 11, 1835). Balzac's interest in the necessity for legal protection of printed material must be mentioned at this point; texts pertaining to this concern occur in OD, II, 643-655; OD, III, 16-22, 262-263, 264-270, 417-434; and in Calmann L é v y Œuvres diverses, pp. 418-427, 430-479, 496-512, 539-546.

22. Balzacian intensity: Étrangère, II, 309 (dated Feb. 16-17, 1844). idlers and workers: (La Mode, May 8, 1830), in OD, II, 28-30; "and more work": Étrangère, II, 73 (dated Oct. 29, 1842). Sisyphus and Hercules: ibid., I, 292, 441, 556 (letters ranging from 1836 to 1841).

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Notes to Chapter III "emotional satisfactions": ibid., I, 324 (dated April 30, 1836). "as much courage": ibid., I, 153 (dated April 28, 1834). 23. Palissy's own record of his experiments may be found in Les Œuvres de Bernard Palissy, ed. Anatole France (Paris, 1880), pp. 378— 390. 24. "monster . . . in the work": Étrangère, II, 120 (dated March 2, 1843). "of literature itself": Lukâcs, Studies in European Realism, tr. Edith Bone (London, 1950), p. 51. "bundle of nerves": ibid., p. 52. "category of artists": Sainte-Beuve, Premiers Lundis (Paris, 1886), I, 419. 25. Modeste Mignon (1844), in CH, I, 408. 26. "a little joker": CH, IV, 754. "to show off": CH, IV, 906. "destiny to fulfill": CH, IV, 591. "powerless to produce": CH, V , 697. 27. "of this century": Preface to ist ed. of Illusions perdues (that is, Les Deux Poètes, 1837), in Calmann Lévy Œuvres diverses, p. 390, and L'Œuvre de Balzac, p. 259. the profoundest secrets: Calmann Lévy Œuvres diverses, pp. 530-534, and VŒuvre de Balzac, pp. 261-266. "laurel of Virgil": CH, IV, 663. "bordellos of thought": CH, IV, 740. 28. "une femme manquée": CH, V , 1112. slim, masculine figure: CH, IV, 486; CH, II, 377. "not a woman": Étrangère, I, 464 (dated March 2, 1838). 29. "trust in Work": CH, IV, 662. reproach to Lucien: CH, IV, 752. "regularity in work": CH, VI, 24. L'art pour l'art: OD, I, 359-360. 30. OD, I, 357. 31. "some Sancho Panza": Balzac, Pensées, sujets, fragmens, ed. Jacques Crépet (Paris, 1910), pp. 130-131 (the phrase occurs among Balzac's notes for a comedy, L'Artiste, which was to treat lightly what Torquato Tasso had treated tragically), "to make gold": CH, IX, 648. "crown of thorns": CH, VI, 1060. des Grands Hommes: Étrangère, I, 574 (dated Jan. 5, 1842). "with good inventions": Balzac, Les Ressources de Quinola (1842), in Théâtre (Paris, 1929), I, 314 (the pun also occurs in Pensées, sujets, fragmens, p. 66). 32. See above, Chapter III, note 8. 33. CH, IV, 930-931. 34. CH, VI, 1017. 35. "perpetual action": CH, II, 521. Fernand Baldensperger, Orientations étrangères, p. 11. 36. strong-willed companions: cf. Flat, Essais, pp. 199-242, passim, esp. p. 200. "or of body": Étrangère, I, 303 (dated March 8, 1836). Étienne Lousteau: ibid., II, 160 (dated May 15, 1843; according to this letter, Balzac had a hard time convincing Liszt that Gennaro Conti was not a portrait of him), bad examples: cf. Harry Levin, Toward Balzac, Direction Three (New Directions, 1947), p. 28. 37. helpless as a child: cf. OD, II, 651-652; and CH, IX, 1112. on

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Alfred de Vigny self-sufficiency: the original title of Le Cousin Pons was Les Deux Musiciens, which indicated more clearly the fact that Pons and Schmiicke were primarily artists; the title was changed, Balzac wrote, to emphasize the contrast of the two novels which form l'Histoire des parents pauvres — Pons and Bette (L'Œuvre de Balzac, p. 358). 38. "Slavic soul": CH, VI, 187. in their liaison: CH, VI, 186, 189. "demi-artist": CH, VI, 323. "artist inpartibus": CH, VI, 522. 39. OD, I, 354. 40. Ibid., I, 355. 41. Quoted in Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, Histoire, p. 172. 42. Letters to His Family, p. 91 (to Laure Surville, July 20, 1832, in which Balzac indicated his desire to equal Manfred and Faust in writing the Notice biographique sur Louis Lambert). 43. "Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu" (Conte fantastique), VArtiste, I (1831), 319-323; II (1831), 7-10; the passages added to the second version are chiefly Frenhofer's critical and theoretical disquisitions (CH,

I X , 392-398, passim-, 400-401, 403, 412-413, 4 1 3 - 4 1 4 ) , but Fren-

hofer's suicide was also an afterthought. 44. "world of matter": CH, IX, 536. the same end: CH, IX, 878. 45. Lambert of music: Balzac, note to Maurice Schlésinger, May 29, 1837, in Calmann Levy Œuvres diverses, p. 495. "of modern music": CH, I X , 471-472.

46. Salvator Rosa, quoted in van Tieghem, Le Préromantisme, I, 60. "obeys a master": OD, I, 353. 47. Baudelaire, Œuvres, pp. 672, 944, 1029. Chapter IV. Alfred de Vigny: The Man in the Ivory Tower Most of the references to the works of Alfred de Vigny in this chapter are to the Œuvres complètes, ed. Fernand Baldensperger (Paris, 19J0), and which I abbreviate as OC. Texts from the Journal d'un poète will contain in addition the indication JP and the date. 1. "I have suffered": JP, 1863, OC, II, 1391. Leconte de Lisle, "Alfred de Vigny" (Les Poètes contemporains, IV), in Derniers Poèmes, p. 271. Gautier, Histoire du romantisme, p. 263. 2. Edmond Estève, Alfred de Vigny (Paris, 1929), p. 9. 3. "plunged in night": JP, 1824, OC, II, 880. indicated by God: Stello, OC, I, 679; Chatterton, OC, I, 887-888; cf. JP, 1834, OC, II, 1017, on the name "Stello": "No critic has ventured to see that Stello means both: I lead and I stop, regular movement and order." a subservient position: JP, 1836, OC, II, 1048. "enlightened compatriots": "Lettre à Lord (1829), OC, I, 348-349. "behind is death": JP, 1829, OC, II, 898.

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Notes to Chapter I V 4. "spiritualize the nation": JP, 1835, OC, II, 1031. a definite lesson: JP, 1834, OC, II, 1018. "on the highway": JP, 1834, OC, II, 1019. popular sovereignty: JP, 1830, OC, II, 930; JP, 1841, OC, II, 1148. "of this age": JP, 1829, OC, II, 897. "idiot mass": JP, 1834, OC, II, 1006. "aristocracy of the intelligence": JP, 1831, OC, II, 934; JP, 1840, OC, II, 1134; JP, 1862, OC, II, 1376-1377; JP, 1863, OC, II, 1392. was a

desert: JP, 1862, OC, II, 1366-1367; the sentiment occurs many times even if the phrase does not. the people's voice: JP, 1832, OC, II, 958. "side by side": JP, 1832, OC, II, 975. 5. The circular is reproduced in Vigny, Correspondance, ed. Emma Sakellaridès (Paris, 1906), pp. 392-394. 6. Cf. Henri Guillemin, M. de Vigny, homme d'ordre et poète (Paris, 195J), pp. 14-30; it was Guillemin who revealed Vigny's activities as a ponce-spy, and who pointed out that this was the poet's somewhat dubious way of taking an active part in political affairs. 7. JP, 1847, OC, II, 1260. 8. Casimir Delavigne, Le Paria, in Théâtre (Paris, 1825), III, no. "epic of disillusionment": JP, 1835, OC, II, 1037. "intelligent pariah": OC, I, 870-871.

9. "temporal power": OC, I, 654. perpetual ostracism: OC, I, 787. "the present moment": JP, 1841, OC, II, 1158. materialistic society: JP, 1840, OC, II, 1129. 10. OC, II, 786. 11. the "happy few": JP, 1837, OC, II, 1068-1069. "spoils its dress": Vigny, Correspondance, ed. Fernand Baldensperger (Paris, 1933), p. 86 (dated Jan. 16, 1825). rendered gross: JP, 1829, OC, II, 895; JP, 1833, OC, II, 989. "to me as hatred": JP, 1833, OC, II, 988. aristocracy of the intelligence: JP, 1831, OC, II, 934. march of genius: JP, 1842, OC, II, 1190. 12. OC, II, 894, 945, 946, 949, 956, 967, 993, 1003 (JP, ranging from 1829 to 1834). 13. JP, 1828, OC, II, 887. 14. OC, II, 1023.

15. Gilbert, "Ode imitée de plusieurs psaumes," in Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1823), p. 133. Chémer, Elegy X X V , in Œuvres complètes, p. 77. Mme de Staël, Corinne, III, 423-433. Dorange, Almanack des Muses, 1812, pp. 165-168. Millevoye, "La Chute des feuilles," in Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1822), I, 56. Holmondurand, Recueil des jeux floraux de l'Académie de Toulouse (1821); Lamartine, Nouvelles Méditations poétiques (1823); Loyson, Lycée français, passim, "won't be the first": Legouvé, Soixante Ans de souvenirs, I, 110, quoted in Brunetière, Évolution de la poésie, I, 104, note. Baour-Lormian, Le Classique et le romantique, pp. 9-10. 16. Sainte-Beuve, Joseph Delorme, p. 56.

266

Alfred de Vigny 17. Béranger, "Le Suicide. Sur la mort des jeunes Victor Escousse et Auguste Lebras," in Œuvres, II, 302-305. 18. Petrus Borel, Champavert, contes immoraux ( 1833) (Paris, 1922), pp. 315-316. 19. OC, I, 822-823. 20. OC, I, 675 21. "law of my being": OC, I, 838. "in spite of me": OC, I, 840. "no one pities": OC, I, 839. "in the cradle": OC, I, 841. 22. a definite function: OC, I, 869. "in a profit": OC, I, 833. "everyone's way": OC, I, 837. a leitmotif-. OC, I, 830, 832, 883. 23. Vigny, Correspondance, ed. Léon Séché (Paris, n.d.), I, 108-109 (to Auguste Callet and Javelin Pagnon, June 26, 1839). 24. "De Mademoiselle Sedaine et de la propriété littéraire," OC, I, 907-943; first pub. Revue des Deux Mondes; as in Chatterton, Vigny used the plight of a helpless woman to support his plea for material aid to poets; see also OC, II, 1097-1098, 1105, 1146, 1168-1169, r 3S°~ 1351,1361-1362 (JP, ranging from 1838 to 1861). 25. "reasonable exit": JP, 1832, OC, II, 953; Chatterton, OC, I, 872. "in the embers": OC, I, 820. "the Docteur Noir": JP, 1836, OC, II, 1046-1047. 26. "a woman swooned": JP, 1840, OC, II, 1130. "outbursts of sympathy": JP, 1857, OC, II, 1334. "renounce their dreams": Gautier, Histoire du romantisme, p. 154. 27. Musset, quoted in JP, OC, II, 1040. Moreau, "A l'auteur de Chatterton" (1835), in Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1890), II, 119-121. Dupeuty and Duvert, quoted in Biré, Victor Hugo après 1830, I, 158 (the "escalier curieux" suggests also the "escalier / Dérobé" of Hernani). Gustave Planche, "Chatterton de M. Alfred de Vigny," Revue des Deux Mondes, 4th ser., I (1835), 428-442. the poet's destiny: OC, I, 823; cf. JP, 1839, OC, II, 1125. "struggle any longer": L'Artiste, IX (1835), 34. Barbier, Souvenirs personnels et silhouettes contemporaines (Paris, 1883), pp. 222-225, quoted in Léon Séché, Alfred de Vigny et son temps (Paris, n.d.), pp. 162-163, note 3. 28. and his pride: JP, 1833, OC, II, 986. "douze fois impur": "La Colère de Samson" (1839), OC, I, 197; cf. JP, 1835, OC, II, 1034: "Delilah! . . . Oh dreadful symbol of woman, perfidious mistress who turns over to his enemies the one who loved her, sells him to his adversaries — him, so great, so strong, that he is vulnerable only through her!" "more noble": JP, 1839, OC, II, 1121-1122. not defend themselves: JP, 1857, OC, II, 1336. 29. Cf. JP, 1842, OC, II, 1186-1187: ". . . a man with self-respect has only one thing to do. Publish, see no one, and forget his book. A book is a bottle thrown into the high seas, on which one must glue this lable: Catch it who can."

267

Notes to Chapter I V 30. OC, I, 210. 31. Ibid., I, 209. 32. "of the streets": Correspondance, ed. Séché, I, 217 (to Camilla Maunoir, May 23, 1848). "Solitude is holy": OC, I, 803. "vile and wicked": Vigny, Lettres à Brizeux, ed. Éric Lugin (Paris, 1954), p. 62 (dated Feb. 3, 1852). Leconte de Lisle, preface to Poèmes antiques (1852), in Derniers Poèmes, p. 218. to a monk: Correspondance, ed. Séché, II, 181 (to the Viscountess du Plessis, Feb. 28, i860). Trappist monastery: JP, 1862, OC, II, 1381. 33. JP, 1850, OC, II, 1276. 34. "liberty is dignity": JP, 1847, OC, II, 1263. Julian the Apostate: JP, 1834, OC, II, 1004. his father's death: JP, 1837, OC, II, 1092. "de la Divinité": "Le Silence" (that is, "Le Mont des Oliviers," 1862), OC, I, 208. 35. "to physical ecstasy": JP, 1828, OC, II, 888. "sa magique saveur": OC, I, 182. "than life itself": JP, 1850, OC, II, 1274. "aux clartés éternelles," Baudelaire, Œuvres, p. 94. an endless dream: JP, 1832, OC, II, 952; JP, 1834, OC, II, 1008; JP, 1851, OC, II, 1285-1286. "limitless, formless": JP, 1829, OC, II, 894. "crystallized Enthusiasm": JP, 1837, OC, II, 1078. "its preserving crystal": JP, 1842, OC, II, 1167. "durable pierre . . .": OC, I, 180. to a sculptor: Correspondance, ed. Séché, II, 45 (to Charles Farcinet, July 11, 1851). 36. "of that beauty": JP, 1851, OC, II, 1287-1288. Atticism: JP, 1851, OC, II, 1277 ("Atticism is the love of all beauty . . ."). "for Art's sake": JP, 1852, OC, II, 1289. as he read: JP, 1862, OC, II, 1366. inherited from them: JP, 1862, OC, II, 1373. 37. "whirlwind of action": JP, 1833, OC, II, 986. "who create thoughts": JP, 1832, OC, II, 975. control of his will: JP, 1837, OC, II, 1072. "it in motion": JP, 1837, OC, II, 1071. 38. JP, 1836, OC, II, 1039. 39. the contemplative life: JP, 1855, OC, II, 1318; and passim throughout the rest of the Journal, "great acts": JP, 1862, OC, II, 1377. "of the soul": JP, 1862, OC, II, 1381. 40. JP, 1856, OC, II, 1319. 41. OC, I, 224, 42. OC, I, 225. 43. Léon Dierx, "Alfred de Vigny," in Œuvres complètes (Paris, n.d.), II, 217-218. 44. Poèmes antiques, pp. 26-29. 45. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Manette Salomon (Paris, 1877), p. 324. 46. The image occurs many times in Vigny's Lettres d'un dernier amour: correspondance inédite avec "Augusta", ed. V. L. Saulnier (Geneva, Lille, 1952). 208

Gustave Flaubert Chapter V . Gustave Flaubert: T h e Artist as Raging Saint Most references in this chapter are to the following editions of Flaubert's works: Œuvres de jeunesse inédites (Paris, 1910); La Tentation de Saint Antoine (Paris, 1924); Œuvres, ed. A. Thibaudet and R. Dumesnil (Paris, 1951-1952); Correspondance (Paris, 1926J 933); Correspondance (Supplément), ed. René Dumesnil, Jean Pommier, and Claude Digeon (Paris, 1954). They are indicated in the notes, respectively, as OJ, Tentation, Œuvres, Corr, and Corr (Supp). 1. "not to suffer": Corr, IV, i j (to Louise Colet, Jan. 1854). "in the sheepfold": Corr, III, 275 (to Louise Colet, July 12, 1853). "Superior Man": Corr, I, 93 (to Ernest Chevalier, Jan. 22, 1842). "Bourgeoisophobus": Corr, III, 75 (to Louis Bouilhet, Dec. 26, 1852). "last twenty years": Corr, IV, 377 (to the Goncourts, May, i860). 2. Corr, I, 14 (to Ernest Chevalier, Aug. 29, 1834). 3. OJ, I, 6 ("Voyage en enfer" is undated; it was written, however, after Flaubert entered collège in 1832). 4. Gautier, Histoire du romantisme, p. 96. Petrus Borel, "Sur l'Art," L'Artiste, 4th ser., V (1846), 173. Philothée O'Neddy, Lettre inédite sur le groupe littéraire romantique, dit des Bousingos (Paris, 1875), p. 15. 5. lives more unbearable: Corr, II, 363 (to Louise Colet, Feb. 1, 1852). "Victor Hugo": Corr, VI, 475. 6. Corr, I, n o (to Ernest Chevalier, July 22, 1842). 7. OJ, III, 316. 8. "rage and humiliation": OJ, III, 8. idealized homosexuality: cf. OJ, III, 8-9, 3J-36. "how could we live": Corr, I, 6 (to Ernest Chevalier, April 3, 1832?). in Louis Lambert: Corr, III, 76-78 (to Louise Colet, Dec. 27, 1852). "some succulent poet': Corr, I, 152 (to Louis de Cormenin, June 7, 1844). 9. "all turned white": OJ, III, 34. "before having run": OJ, I, 487. "why should this be": OJ, II, 163-164. "phrases are savory": OJ, III, 303. perception of pain: Corr, III, 358 (to Louise Colet, Sept. 30. 1853). 10. "believing it a lie": OJ, III, 143. "were a cadaver": OJ, III, 166. "began with himself," "superhuman stoicism": OJ, III, 243. from nervous disorders: Corr, I, 218 (to Louise Colet, Aug. 6, 1846). "insensitive instead": Corr, II, 63 (to Louise Colet, 1847). "cancer of lyricism": Maxime Du Camp, Souvenirs littéraires (Paris, 1883), I, 433-

11. OJ, III, 246. 12. OJ, I, 527 (quoted in Chap. I, above, pp. jo-51).

269

Notes to Chapter V 13. OJ, III, 310. 14. "one of the disinherited": Œuvres, II, 48. "feminine nature": OJ, III, 101. "with every weakness": Œuvres, II, 330. "fear of failure": ibid., II, 54. "of his heart": ibid, II, 449. Albert Thibaudet, Gustave Flaubert (Paris, 1935), p. 150. a positive science: cf. Corr, VI, 32-33, 227-230, 241-244, 264, 265, 281-282; VIII, 93; and Corr (Supp), IV, 104-105 (letters ranging from 1869 to 1878). "we have dreamed": Œuvres, II, 299. 15. "shy of myself": Corr, I, 226 (to Louise Colet, Aug. 8, 1846). Alfred Le Poittevin, Une Promenade de Bêlial et œuvres inédites, ed. René Descharmes (Paris, 1924), p. 209 (letter probably written before 1845). to convey in UÉducatìon sentimentale: Corr, V, 257-258 (to George Sand, Dec. 15-16, 1866). "being an artist": Flaubert's notes for his novel, quoted in Marie-Jeanne Durry, Flaubert et ses projets inédits (Paris, 1950), p. 192. 16. Corr, IV, 164 (to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie, March 18, 1857). 17. would he accept: Corr IV, 369 (to Louis Bouilhet, March 29, i860; cf. Corr, III, 19; V, 159-160). "of that axiom": Corr, II, 269 (to his mother, Dec. 15, 1850). as other men do: Corr, VII, 328 (to Guy de Maupassant, July 23, 1876). "Poésie oblige": Corr, III, 328 (to Louise Colet, Aug. 27, 1853). 18. "Doctor of Melancholy": Corr, IV, 271 (to Mile Leroyer de Chantepie, July 11, 1858). art and pride: Corr, I, 172, 372, 211; VII, 10. "you have to choose": Corr, V, 22 (to Jules Duplan, June 1862). "at pleasing myself": Corr, II, 442-443 (to Maxime Du Camp, June 26, 1852; cf. Corr, I, 205, 233, 360, 386-387; II, 39-40, 64-65, 201-202, 328-329, 355, 384-385; IV, 147, 272; VI, 250, 276-277, 385, letters ranging from 1846 to 1872). "shameful popularity": Corr, I, 312 (to Louise Colet, Sept. 15, 1846). 19. "wish I were dead": Corr, I, 429 (to Louise Colet, Dec. 20, 1846). of castrating himself: Corr, III, 77 (to Louise Colet, Dec. 27, 1852). "drunk on wine": Corr, IV, 356 (to Mile Leroyer de Chantepie, Dec. 18, 1859). 20. "makes one unhappy": Corr, IV, 277 (to Mile Leroyer de Chantepie, Sept. 4, 1858). "his wretched self": Corr, VI, 372 (to George Sand, May 1872). "nothing in common": Corr, III, 305307 (to Louise Colet, Aug. 21-22, 1853). "it does foetuses": Corr, 11, 450 (to Louise Colet, June 27-28, 1852). but literature itself: Corr, II, 452-453 (to Maxime Du Camp, July 1852). "with your head . . .": Corr, III, 30 (to Louise Colet, Sept. 25, 1852). express himself accurately: Corr, II, 462 (to Louise Colet, July 5-6, 1852). "or a confidence": Corr, IV, 61-62 (to Louise Colet, April 22, 1854). could not explain: Corr, I, 212 (to Louise Colet, Aug. 4, 1846). "dried up your heart": Corr, IV, 78-79 (to Louis Bouilhet, June 28, 1855).

270

Gustave Flaubert 21. "side of Right": Corr, II, 396 (to Louise Colet, April 24, 1852). "No limits": Corr, II, 415-416 (to Louise Colet, June ij-16, 1852). the Ivory Tower: cf. Corr, III, 240, 241; IV, 24; V, 153, 197, 329; VI, 280; and Corr (Supp), III, 61-62 (letters ranging from 1853 to 1872). "should be punished": Corr, VI, 30-31 (to George Sand, June 1869). "way of life": Corr, IV, 357 (to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie, Dec. 18, 1859). 22. "its divine diadem": Corr, I, 22 (to Ernest Chevalier, Aug. 14, 1835). vessels of God: Corr, I, 232 (to Louise Colet, Aug. 9, 1846). aesthetic mysticism: Corr, III, 16 (to Louise Colet, Sept. 4, 1852). "at your table": Corr, IV, 43 (to Louise Colet, March 25-26, 1854). 23. Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston, New York, 1919), p. 340. necessary to the artist: Corr, III, 148-149 (to Louise Colet, March 31, 1853). heart of man: Corr, I, 27 (to Ernest Chevalier, June 24, 1837). "than he gallops": Corr, I, 420-421 (to Louise Colet, Dec. 13, 1846). a long patience: Corr, I, 254-255, 420-421; II, 320323, 372-373; III, 21, 180; IV, 48-49 (letters ranging from 1846 to 1854). "as a whole": Corr, III, 414 (to Louise Colet, Dec. 28, 1853). "do our works": Corr, IV, 279 (to Ernest Feydeau, Oct. 1858). "perfecting one's self": Corr, VIII, 168 (to his niece Caroline, Dec. 6-7, 1878). 24. "my natural manner": Corr, II, 423 (to Louise Colet, June? 1852). "metaphysics and mythology": Corr, III, 156 (to Louise Colet, April 6, 1853). "the author absent": Corr, II, 361 (to Louise Colet, Feb. 1, 1852). never even lived: Corr, II, 380 (to Louise Colet, March 27, 1852). attached to his fingers: Corr, III, 3 (to Louise Colet, July 27, 1852). "time, and sweat . . .": Corr, IV, 239-240 (to Ernest Feydeau, Nov. or Dec. 1857). art of sacrifices: Corr, VII, 321 (to Eugène Fromentin, July 19, 1876). everything to art: Corr, VIII, 136 (to Guy de Maupassant, Aug. 15, 1878). to an Amazon: Corr, III, 215 (to Louise Colet, 1853); IV, 452 (to Ernest Feydeau, 1861). "rip out your heart": Corr, III, 306 (to Louise Colet, Aug. 21-22, 1853). "solitude, and obscurity": Corr, VIII, 213 (to Guy de Maupassant, Feb. 21, 1879). 25. ours: besides the references below, cf. Corr (Supp), I, 39; and Corr, I, 268-270; IV, 17, 419 (letters ranging from 1843 to 1861). a veritable "bear": Corr, I, 89 (to Ernest Chevalier, Dec. 31, 1841). of Gustave Flaubert-. Corr, I, 181 (to Ernest Chevalier, June 15, 1845). "for you, Nanny": Corr, VIII, 361 (to his niece Caroline, Jan. 27, 1880). "no more calm": Corr, IV, 299 (to Mile Leroyer de Chantepie, Dec. 26, 1858). 26. "express the Idea": Corr, II, 53-54 (to Louise Colet, Oct. 1847). "hearts, and why": Corr, III, 338 (to Louise Colet, Sept. 12, 1853). "uncontrollable whim": Corr, II, 384 (to Louise Colet, April 3, 1852). "throes of Art": Corr, III, 369 (to Louise Colet, Oct. 17-18, 1853). 271

Notes to Chapter V 27. a martyrology: Corr, VIII, 100 (to his niece Caroline, Dec. 4, 1877). "a radiant face": Corr, III, 362 (to Louise Colet, Sept. 30, 1853). of his own life: Corr, IV, 340 (to Ernest Feydeau, Oct. 1859); VII, 123 (to his niece Caroline, Feb. 28, 1874, in which Flaubert ascribes the comparison to Louis Bouilhet). a dungeon cell: Corr, IV, 153-154 (to Achille Flaubert, Jan. 1857). 28. "scratches his belly": Corr, II, 394 (to Louise Colet, April 24, 1852). Claude Vigée, "Les Artistes de la faim," Comparative Literature, IX (1957), 99. "for an emission": Corr (Supp), II, 94 (to Hippolyte Taine, Dec. 1, 1866). "you will them": Corr, III, 97 (to Louise Colet, Feb. 17, 1853). "without an erection": Corr, IV, 208 (to Jules Duplan, July, 1857). "manustirpating myself": Corr, IV, 287 (to Ernest Feydeau, Dec. 19, 1858). "to the bone": Corr, IV, 284 (to Ernest Feydeau, Dec. 1858). "squirt out of it": Corr, IV, 175 (to Ernest Feydeau, April 1857). Léon Daudet, Le Stupide XIXe Siècle, p. 112. and a dog: Corr, IV, 360 (to Mme Roger des Genettes, 18591860?). cruelty to others: cf. Victor Tausk, "On Masturbation," tr. William G. Niederland, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, VI ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 5 1 ) , 6 1 - 7 9 , passim, esp. 75-76.

29. "the common good": Corr, III, 396-397 (to Louise Colet, Dec, 14, 1853). greatest of necessities: Corr (Supp), I, 326 (to Louise Colet, Sept. 20, 1846). "official art": Corr, VI, 484. 30. "the masses are . . .": Corr, I, 11 (to Ernest Chevalier, Sept. 11, 1833). "all the vices": Corr, I, 100 (to Ernest Chevalier, March 15, 1842). "rotten to me": Corr, II, 253 (to Louis Bouilhet, Nov. 14, 1850). "want to vomit": Corr, VI, 142 (to George Sand, Aug. 17, 1870). "formidable and universal": Corr, VI, 307 (to George Sand, Nov. 14, 1871). "name is Legion": Corr, VIII, 6 (to his niece Caroline, Jan. 12, 1877).

31. like Saint Polycarp: cf. Corr, III, 312; V, 176-177, 261; VI, 31, 357» 45°; VU» 95-9 6 ; VIII, 7; a n d Corr (Supp), III, 55, 56-57; IV, 35, 125, 210 (letters ranging from 1853 to 1879). "HHHindignê": Corr, VI, 357 (to George Sand, March 1872). unsociable, outrageous: Corr, VII, 95-96; and Corr (Supp), III, 55. "good M. Flaubert": Corr (Supp), IV, 35 (to Mme Brainne, Oct. 5, 1877). "shade of Saint Polycarp": Corr (Supp), III, 56-57 (to Mme Brainne, Oct. 5, 1872). the beauty of art: Corr, IV, 171 (to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie, March 30, 1857). Philothée O'Neddy, Poésies posthumes (Paris, 1877), p. 489. a strong stomach: Corr, II, 396-398 (to Louise Colet, April 24, 1852; the letter contains a scathing analysis of Lamartine's Graziella, a "false" work), "of human stupidity": Corr (Supp), IV, 170 (to Raoul-Duval, Feb. 1879). Maxime Du Camp, Souvenirs, II, 543. "not at all now": Corr, VI, 458-459 (to George Sand, Dec. 12, 1872). 32. Cf. Harry Levin, "Flaubert: Portrait of the Artist as a Saint," The Kenyon Review, X (1948), 28-43. 272

Charles Baudelaire 33. Tentation, p. 11. 34. Ibid., p. 13. 35. Ibid., pp. 20-21. 36. Ibid., p. 29. 37. Ibid., pp. 42-43. 38. "to be matter": ibid., pp. 200-201. "its ephemeral contingencies": Corr, II, 462 (to Louise Colet, July 5-6, 1852). Georges Poulet, Études sur le temps humain (Edinburgh, 1949), pp. 318-333, passim. "its broadest sense": Corr, I, 310 (to Louise Colet, Sept. 14, 1846). 39. Hugo, "Lettre à une femme," in Poésie VIII, 87. Chapter VI. Charles Baudelaire and the Mirror of Narcissus Most references in this chapter are to Baudelaire, Œuvres competes, ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec (Paris, 1951); Correspondance générale, ed. Jacques Crépet (Paris, 1947-1953); "Notices sur Edgar Poe," in Poe, Histoires, tr. Baudelaire, ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec (Paris, 1932). These three editions will be indicated as OC, Corr, and Notices, respectively. 1. "eternal stigmata": Salon de 185p, OC, p. 789. "melancholic" and "orgiastic": "Épigraphe pour un livre condamné," OC, p. 237. Louis Maigron, Le Romantisme et les mœurs (Paris, 1910), pp. 163f. 2. Petrus Borel, "A Jules Vabre," in Rhapsodies, suivies de poésies diverses, ed. Aristide Marie (Paris, 1922), p. 128. "Poet of cats": Corr, I, 188 (to Champfleury, March IJ, 1853). odors of commerce: "Le Chien et le flacon," OC, pp. 281-282. "man of good will": "Le Musée classique du Bazar Bonne-nouvelle," OC, p. 596. 3. activities in 1848: cf. Jules Mouquet and W. T . Bandy, Baudelaire en 1848: La Tribune nationale (Paris, 1946); Baudelaire, Champfleury, Toubin, Le Salut public, facsimile, ed. Fernand Vandérem (n. p., n.d.); Eugène Crépet, Charles Baudelaire (Paris, 1906), pp. 7879. Petrus Borel, Rhapsodies, p. 13. Charles Asselineau, quoted in preface to Vandérem edition of Le Salut public, p. 6. "things I had read": Mon cœur mis à nu, VIII, OC, p. 1200. "of the world": Mon cœur, LIV, OC, p. 1214. "hatred of everything": Corr, III, 221 (to Mme Aupick, Jan. 1, 1861). "needs a bath": Corr, IV, 168 (to Mme. Aupick, June 5, 1863). "finally understand me": Corr, IV, 313 (to Ancelle, Oct. 13, 1864). with satanic tendencies: Mon cœur, XIX, OC, pp. 1203-1204. "console me for everything": Corr, V, 187 (to Mme Aupick, Dec. 22, 1865). "have acquired solitude": Fusées, XVII, OC, p. 1191. 4. Corr, V, 279. 5. "De l'essence du rire," OC, p. 720. 6. "L'Irrémédiable," OC, p. ijo. 2

7 3

Notes to Chapter V I 7. "and of calculation": "Le Peintre de la vie moderne," OC, pp. 903-904. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Idées et sensations (Paris, 1887), pp. 27-28, $8, 81, 112-113. "birds of prey": Leconte de Lisle, "Les Oiseaux de proie," in Poèmes antiques, p. 274. "d'être un homme": Leconte de Lisle, " A un poète mort," in Poèmes tragiques (Paris, n.d.), p. 103. Brunetière, Évolution de la poésie, II, 180-181. 8. "Spleen," OC, p. 144. 9. "Obsession," OC, p. 145. 10. "fait de l'or": OC, p. 256. "evocative sorcery": OC, p. 1027. "in poetic production": OC, p. 1051. "even in prose": Mon cœur, XCI, OC, p. 1226. 11. OC, p. 94. 12. OC, p. 277. 13. Mon cœur, XIX, OC, pp. 1203-1204. 14. OC, p. 278. 1$. "diabolical perfection": Le Poème du haschisch, OC, p. 462. "a complimentary form": OC, p. 430. "a simple mirror": OC, p. 437. "have become God": OC, p. 465. "admires his face": OC, p. 467. "a speaking symbol": OC, p. 458. 16. a decipherer: OC, p. 1078. "dictionary of hieroglyphics": "Puisque réalisme il y a," OC, p. 985. reality, the ideal: "Theophile Gautier," OC, p. 1023. "understanding of figures": Sainte-Beuve, Joseph Delorme, p. 237. "en symboles divers": Sainte-Beuve, "A mon ami Leroux," in Poésies complètes, p. 244. Alexandre Soumet, "La Jérusalem délivrée" (review, Dec. 1823), in La Muse française, I, 296. philosophical art: cf. esp. "L'Art philosophique, OC, pp. 918926, and "Les Drames et les romans honnêtes," OC, pp. 962-967. 17. "universal analogy": Corr, I, 368 (to Alphonse Toussenel, Jan. 21, 1856). "queen of the faculties": Exposition universelle de 1855, OC, p. 690. popularity of photography: Salon de ¡859, OC, pp. 761762. Freud, "On Narcissism: an introduction," in Collected Papers (New York, 1959), IV, 32-33; and Totem and Taboo, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London), XIII, 75-99. frankness of a child: Exposition universelle de 1851, OC, p. 684. "to express itself": Un Mangeur d'opium, OC, p. 524; "Le Peintre de la vie moderne," OC, p. 880. "almost everyone lacks": Salon de 1846, OC, p. 667. for his naïveté: Salon de 1846, OC, p. 616. Gautier, "Notice" (1868), in Les Fleurs du mal, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1869), p. 15. "frank and naive": Corr, I, 143 (to Mme Aupick, Aug. 30, 1851). "form and color": OC, p. 880. Sartre, Baudelaire (Paris, 1947), p. 60. "dorer les statues": "J'aime le souvenir . . .", OC, p. 85. 18. "a spiritual genre": Le Poëme du haschisch, OC, p. 458. Barbey d'Aurevilly, "Charles Baudelaire" (1857, i860), in Poésie et poètes

274

Charles Baudelaire (Paris, 1906), p. 105. "choses plus belles": "La Beauté," OC, p. 94. "of their souls": "Le Peintre de la vie moderne," OC, p. 904. 19. Petrarch and Parny: Corr, VI, 6 (to Mme Cl.-Alph. Baudelaire, c. March 3, 1846). "chivalry in feeling": Corr, I, 365 (to Mme Aupick, Jan. 9, 1856). "pour son idole": "Chanson d'après-midi," OC, p. 131. "has the body": Mon cœur, L, OC, p. 1213. love for a woman: Mon cœur, XIX, OC, pp. 1203-1204. "excludes homosexuality": Fusées, VI, OC, p. 1184. 20. "forget the lipstick": OC, p. 393. "hermaphroditic and sterile": ibid, "destinies and wills": "Le Peintre de la vie moderne," OC, p. 902. "under her gaze": "Le Désir de peindre," OC, p. 333. 21. "charmante": "Projet d'épilogue," OC, p. 255. "rajeunit sans cesse": "Épilogue," OC, p. 354. "impudent and distressing": Corr, I, 323 (to Fernand Desnoyers, 1855). "of modem life": Salons of 1845 and 1846, OC, pp. 588-589, 601, 671-672. "mat ou bruni": OC, p. 171. 22. OC, p. 125. 23. OC, p. 298. 24. Notices, p. 666. 25. Corr, I, 266 (to Mme Aupick, March 8. 1854). 26. Corr, IV, 227 (to Théophile Thoré, c. June 20, 1864); cf. Corr, III, 41 (to Armand Fraisse, Feb. 18, i860). 27. Freud, "On Narcissism," p. 47. 28. excused Poe's drunkenness: Notices, pp. 668-670, 695-697. Lamartine, "L'Enthousiasme," in Méditations poétiques, I, 133. life of Hoffmann: cf. Marcel Breuillac, "Hoffmann en France," Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, July-September 1906, pp. 427-457, and January-March 1907, pp. 74-105. Jean-Jacques Ampère, in Le Globe, VI, 81 (August 2, 1828), 589. Loève-Veimars, "Les Dernières Années et la mort d'Hoffmann," Revue de Paris, 2nd ed. (Brussels, 1829), VII, 251-268. Saint-Marc Girardin, "Contes fantastiques d'Hoffmann," Revue de Paris, II, 60-68. Philarète Chasles, "Contes fantastiques de E. T. A. Hoffmann," Journal des Débats, Sat., May 22, 1830. "of human passions": N. L'H, in L'Artiste, V I (1833), 66. Dumas, Kean, in Théâtre complet, V (Paris, 1889), pp. 106, 163. Murger, Scènes, p. 45. "thought without brakes": Octave Feuillet, Dalila (Paris, 1857), p. 14. Champfleury, Souvenirs et portraits de jeunesse (Paris, 1872), p. 144. "Prince of Swine": Corr, II, 310 (to Nadar, May 14, 1859). 29. "edification of others": Notices, p. 653. "among inferior men": ibid., p. 683. the curse were one: ibid., p. 697. "Romantic gibberish": Corr, I, 245 (to Champfleury, Jan. 14, 1854). "if it's possible": Corr, II, 315-316 (to Nadar, May 16, 1859). "shadowy and brilliant": Notices, p. 692 (cf. Fusées, XVI, OC, pp. 1187-1188, in which Baude-

275

Notes to Chapter V I laire discussed his ideal of beauty, of which Satan was the most perfect representative), "to undeserved suffering": OC, p. 1120. "his abominable life": Corr, I, 195 (to Mme Aupick, March 26, 1853). 30. "in the flesh": Notices, pp. 670-671. "Brummel's principles": Gautier, "Notice," p. 5. 31. "flight into dreams": Notices, p. 701. "and all disproportion": ibid., p. 708. Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, ed. Adolphe Boschot (Paris, n.d.), pp. 136, 199. "instants moins lourds": OC, p. 98. Chateaubriand's incestuous passions: "L'Esprit et le style de M. Villemain," OC, p. 1145. only a half-truth: cf. Sartre, Baudelaire, pp. 166-169; Marc Eigeldinger, Le Platonisme de Baudelaire (Paris, 1951), p. 41; Ernest Raynaud, Baudelaire et la religion du dandysme (Paris, 1918), p. 19; A. E. Carter, The Idea of Decadence in French Literature (Toronto, 1958), p. 47. Barbey d'Aurevilly, Du Dandysme et de G. Brummel (Paris, n.d.), pp. 24-26. "something truly hideous": Mon cœur, IX, OC, p. 1201. "scoff at them": Mon cœur, XXII, OC, p. 1205. "are called professions": ibid. Eigeldinger, Baudelaire, p. 41. 32. "and anti-humanity": Fusées, XVII, OC, p. 1190 (in English in the original), "the opposite of the dandy": Mon cœur, V , OC, p. 1199. "always correct": Notices, p. 670. "aspires to insensibility": "Le Peintre de la vie moderne." OC, p. 881. "and his dandyism"; Fusées, XXII, OC, p. 1197. "sacrament: suicide": Fusées, XXII, OC, p. 1193. 33. "of a mirror": Mon cœur, V , OC, p. 1200. "and to think": "Le Peintre de la vie moderne," OC, p. 898. "pleasure by himself": Mon cœur, X V , OC, p. 1203. "auto-idolatry": Fusées, XVII, OC, p. 1188. "out of himself": Mon cœur, LXXI, OC, p. 1220. "a special way": Mon cœur, L X V , OC, p. 1218. "one important thing": Mon cœur, LII, OC, p. 1214. "Prostitution": Fusées, I, OC, p. 1181. 34. Mon cœur, I, OC, p. 1198. 35. OC, p. 329. 36. "heaven granted him": OC, p. 369. "taste for waste": Fusées, I, OC, p. 1181. denounced hashish: OC, pp. 422, 465-466, 468. "artist of genius": "Quelques Caricaturistes étrangers," OC, p. 749. perfectly concentrated artist: Corr, II, 139 ( T o Jaquotot, Feb. 20, 1858). 37. " A L L THE T I M E " : Corr, I, 142 (to Mme Aupick, Aug. 30, 1851). "made him so unhappy": Corr, II, 120 (to Mme Aupick, Jan. 11, 1858). "a formidable will": "L'Œuvre et la vie d'Eugène Delacroix," OC, p. 850. secrecy and concentration: OC, p. 863. "a continuous will": Corr, IV, 46 (to Sainte-Beuve, Jan. 25, 1862). "force of habit": Corr, IV, 206-207 ( t o Mme Aupick, Nov. 25, 1863); and cf. Corr, I, 142; II, 107-109, 194; III, 125-126, 234, 263, 295-296; IV, 76-77; V , 85, 189 (letters ranging from 1851 to 1865). "business at hand": Mon cœur, XCIV, OC, p. 1228. "the penance disappear":

276

The Fate of Icarus Corr, V, 32 (to Ancelle, Feb. 8, 1865). "dissatisfaction with myself": Corr, I, 228 (to Poulet-Malassis, Dec. 16, 1853). A. E. Carter, The Idea of Decadence, p. 49. Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," in Collected Papers, IV, IJ6. "sloth and violence": Corr, IV, 160 (to Mme Aupick, June 3, 1863). "fish in water": Corr, V, 9-10 (to Mme Paul Meurice, Jan. 3, I86J). "Magical art": Mon cœur, XCIV, OC, p. 1228, "perfectioning of health": Fusées, XVII, OC, p. 1189. "whom I despise": OC, p. 285. 38. Barbey d'Aurevilly, Poésie et poètes, p. 123. Wilde, "Pen, Pencil and Poison," in Essays, ed. Hesketh Pearson (London, 1950), p. 76. Cocteau, Œuvres, X, 109. 39. "pleine de frissons": "Le Coucher du soleil romantique," OC, p. 207. "servira de tombeau": "Les Plaintes d'un Icare," OC, p. 243. Anatole France, La Vie littéraire, 3rd ser. (Paris, 1891), p. 303. 40. Martin Turnell, Baudelaire (n.p., n.d.), p. 109. 41. T . S. Eliot, "Baudelaire," in Selected Essays (New York, 1932), pp. 335-345, esp. pp. 340-341.

Chapter VII. The Fate of Icarus 1. Hugo, Poésie III, 319. Baudelaire, Corr, V, 303 (to Mme Aupick, March 5, 1866). Bourget, Essais de psychologie contemporaine, def. ed. (Paris, 1920), I, 19. 2. Proust, Chroniques (Paris, 1927), pp. 178-179. 3. Banville, "Ballade de ses regrets pour l'an mil huit cent trente," in Œuvres (Paris, 1890), p. 197. Baudelaire, Notices, pp. 699-700. Renard, Journal, I, 318. "d'Été, se liquéfie": Gabriel Vicaire and Henri Beauclair, Les Déliquescences d'Adoré Floupette (1885) (Paris, 1911), p. 79. 4. Maxime Du Camp, Les Forces perdues, in Revue nationale et étrangère politique, scientifique et littéraire, XXV, 313. "and of life": Goncourt, Charles Demailly (Paris, 1891), p. 72. "the human species": ibid., p. 283. "covered with blood": Goncourt, Idées et sensations, p. 109. "beauty offered him": Goncourt, Manette Salomon (Paris, 1877), pp. 195-196.

5. Edmond de Goncourt, Les Frères Xemganno (Paris, 1879), P- 3756. "le laisser — souvent": Corbière, Les Amours jaunes, ed. Alexandre Arnoux (Paris, 1947), p. 77. "affaire d'habitude": ibid., p. 78. "s'attendant mourir": ibid., p. 292. "Mephisto blagueur": ibid., p. 447. "d'une fête lointaine": Laforgue, Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1947), I, 44. "purs pierrots": ibid., I, 226. Renato Poggioli, "Qualis Artifex Pereo! or Barbarism and Decadence," Harvard Library Bulletin, XIII (1959), 135-159. 277

Notes to Chapter VII 8. Zola, L'Œuvre (Paris, 1886), p. 486. 9. Ibid., p. 437. 10. "to take it": ibid., p. 89. "at our feet": ibid., pp. 173-174. "with the Angel": ibid., p. 327. "produce a madman": ibid., p. 483. 11. "at his touch": ibid., p. 469. "remove the odor": ibid., p. 483. "big stationary brothers": ibid., p. 211. 12. "big childish artist": ibid., pp. 216, 275, 329, 417. "superb abortion": ibid., p. 346. "il s'est tué": ibid., p. 491. "are a male": Flaubert, Corr, VIII, 11 j (to Zola, April 1878). Cocteau, Œuvres, X, 103-104. 13. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (New York, 1926), p. 240. 14. Gautier, Mlle de Maupin, p. 248. 15. Ibid., pp. 161-162. 16. Huysmans, A rebours (Paris, n.d.), p. 2. 17. Ibid., p. 90. 18. "into physical desire": quoted in Ernest Raynaud, "Robert de Montesquiou," in En marge de la mêlée symboliste (Paris, 1936), p. 181. "celibate of art": Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu (Paris, 1919-1927), X V , 39 (Montesquiou was, after all, one of the models for the baron de Charlus). 19. "sur ses genoux": Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, ed. Rolland de Renéville and Jules Mouquet (Paris, 1951), p. 47. Leconte de Lisle, "Vénus de Milo," in Poemes antiques, p. 134. "the second Romantics": Rimbaud, Œuvres, p. 257. 20. Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse), Les Chants de Maldoror ( V ) , in Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1946), p. 176. "multiplier of progress": Rimbaud, Œuvres, pp. 255, 256. 21. Ibid., p. 254. 22. Ibid., p. 103. 23. "mind was sacred": ibid., p. 200. "and of whirlwinds": ibid., p. 223. "to greet beauty": ibid., p. 224. "art is foolishness": ibid., p. 2

35-

24. Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle (New York, 1953), pp. 282-283. 2 j. "addressed to you": Mallarmé, Propos sur la poésie, ed. Henri Mondor (Monaco, 1953), p. 40. "fleurit la Beauté": Mallarmé, Œuvres, p. 33. "a Pure Conception": Propos, p. 87. 26. Œuvres, p. 42. 27. "alchemists, called it": Propos, p. 89. "of the Earth": Œuvres, p. 663. "sole spiritual task": Propos, p. 134. give concrete form: Œuvres, p. 663. 28. "to internal reality": Proust, A la recherche, X V , 27. "true Last Judgment": ibid., X V , 23. "useless and unsatisfied": ibid., X V , 39. "work of art": ibid., X V , 22. Baudelaire, OC, p. 89. "on the moon": Proust, A la recherche, X V , 43-44. "to see women": ibid., VII, 185.

278

Index Abraham, Karl, io8n Adam, Juliette, 46 Aeschylus, 90, 91 Aesop, 74 Ailes d'Icare, Les (Bernard), 122,162 A la recherche du temps perdu (Proust), 245 Albertus (Gautier), 49 Almanach des Muses, 23, 32, 43, 132, 134 "Amis, un dernier mot" (Hugo), 72 Ampère, Jean-Jacques, 202 Ancelle, Narcisse-Désiré, 185 Andrieux, François, 133 A rebours (Huysmans), 236, 237, 238 Ariosto, Ludovico, 58 Arp, Jean, 8in Artiste, L' (periodical), 7, 10, 48, 140 Artiste, V (Scribe), 6 "Artiste, le savant et l'industriel, L' " (Rodrigues & Halévy), 6 Artistes, Les (Collin d'Harleville), 6 Asselineau, Charles, 183 Auden, Wystan Hugh, 149, 218 Aupick, General Jacques, 183, 201 Aupick, Madame Jacques, 213 Aventures de Mademoiselle Mariette, Les (Champfleury), 182 Babbitt, Irving, 167, 247 Bachelard, Gaston, 57, 58, 215 Baldensperger, Fernand, 25, 113 Ballanche, Pierre-Simon, 47, 68, 74, 76 Balzac, Honoré de, Chapter III: 93122; activism, 9, 42, 48, 146, 149, 182; sense of self, 54, 150, 184; as nobleman, 45; on artists' problems, 42, 43, 44; on Chatterton, 140; on poetry and masculinity, 171, 234;

on word "artist," 8; and Baudelaire, 182, 184, 187, 211, 213, 214, 229, 230, 247; and Flaubert, IJJ, 160, 171, 180, 184, 229, 230, 247; and Gautier, 235; and the Goncourts, 221; and Hugo, j8, 60, 62n, 123, 149, 182, 184, 187, 229, 230, 235, 247; and Napoleon, 48; and Vigny, 123, 124, 140, 149, 182, 184, 229, 230, 247-, and Zola, 225, 226, 228, 229 Banville, Theodore de, 56, 189, 219, 22 4. 2 39. 243 Baour-Lormian, Marie-François, 18, 32» '33 Barbey d'Aurevilly, Jules, 196, 203, 203n, 207, 214, 237, 237n Barbier, Auguste, 140 "Bardes, Les" (Hugo), 69, 70 Barrault, Emile, 7, 73 Baudelaire, Charles, Chapter VI: 181-216; as Parnassian, 123; envy of bourgeois life, 226; on Poe, 52, 58; on the poet, 37; on Wagner, nn; "Plaintes d'un Icare, Les," 218; rejection of activism, 48; theories of poetry, 4n, 56, 83,144, 230, 2 33> 235> 23